Morning Gooners, we all good?
I have to admit, I was kind of sad that I didn’t watch the batshit-mental football match last night that was Man United 4 – 4 Bournemouth. Looks like a Christmas hum-dinger of a game and one in which I saw Jamie Carragher describe it as “the best of the season”.
Of course it was. It had lots of goals, one team winning, then the other team, then the other team again before settling on a draw. For the neutral (no such thing) it was a barnstormer and for Sky it’s exactly what they want from a football match to advertise “The Barclays”.
But for both Bournemouth and United fans I bet it was a bit of a nightmare. Both teams will leave that game feeling like they should have won and both of those teams will probably come away with an unsatisfied feeling in their mouths and minds.
And I thought about our 4-4 against The Scum and I tried to put myself back in that position when it happened to us and how I felt. And it was even maddening now thinking about it. There are other matches, like the 4-4 at Newcastle, but that had the whiff of dodgy refereeing in it. There was the 4-4 at Anfield in which Arshavin but I feel like by then both teams weren’t really in the running for anything so it didn’t have the jeopardy about it. So it’s that 4-4 against Them that sprang to mind.
Now I fast forward to today and to how Arsenal really haven’t been a team who the likes of Sky Sports and TNT Sport want to hang their ‘great advert for the Premier League’ Schtick on, because other than the last few weeks, we aren’t exactly a team who are playing basketball matches are we? Last weekend had late drama, but that was because Arsenal were complacent for one moment. Villa Park had great drama and was described a ‘great match’, but that’s because it was a bit of an anomaly; Arsenal don’t usually play the way the opponent wants and Villa always want that type of game, where it’s a little end-to-end. It’s why they’re on this great run; nobody is actually low-blocking Villa from what I’m seeing. Wolves didn’t when they played them. We didn’t. West Ham didn’t. So you get those games. I think as well to an extent, it is the same with City, because Palace had a go at them last weekend, Fulham did in the 5-4, plus Leeds nearly snatched a draw too.
That’s what happened to us in our first season we competed for the title in 2023/24. Teams came at us because they saw a side who had two years prior been still a work in progress. Now they see a side who doesn’t let up too much, but also one that if you low block, there is an outside chance that you might be able to frustrate a draw, or score with your one chance you get. So the evolution of this Arsenal team is to take that ‘next step’ and to really push down the metaphorical boot on the neck of opponents.
I think that has to be in finding a way to score more first half goals. We’ve got 30 in the Premier League this season, with 13 of those coming in the first half. Not bad, nearly half, but City have scored eight more than us and six of those eight have come in the first half. When you score first, especially against so-called weaker opponents, it stands to reason that you are more than likely to go on to win the game (this blog is a few years old but goes into a little more detail and I still think is relevant). But Arsenal are such a good defensive unit (albeit we’ve seen some cracks appearing recently, I think we can all admit) that when we score first, the game more often than not feels like it’s almost there in terms of being won. If the psychological blow is dealt early, then it totally changes the complexion of the match. This season we have scored first in nearly half of our matches (seven). Conversely, Man City have scored in 12 of their 16 matches so far. That means the game opens up, they have an opponent who has to come out, so they get more chances to rack up more goals. This is what Arteta needs to unlock.
I’m a simple football fan. I’m not one of your in-depth deep analytical fans who can pour over hours and hours of data and come up with some hyper-intelligent answer. If you want that, check out the amazing Billy Carpenter on Substack – he’s great. I like to dabble and have a bit of a look on FBref to see if some numbers give me a bit of a story, but it’s only top line. But to my simple eyes and with my simple feelings, I do feel like the only way Arsenal unlock this league and win it the way I’d like us to win it – like Liverpool did last season – is if we find a way to unlock games. The simple eye test that I have and some of those around me in Block Five that I go to the games with, tells me/us that we start games too slow, too methodical in our build up. There’s too often that we shadow-box out opponents. It’s almost as if Arteta sometimes says “just suss the other guys out there for 15 minutes so I can see how they are set up tactically, then we’ll tweak it accordingly to see if we can win the game”. I know that’s clearly not what Arteta is telling them, but again, it’s just the way it feels as a fan when you’re in the stands watching it play out with the raw emotion and nerves of needing to win the game. It feels to me that there is an inherent caution in this Arsenal team in first halves of matches and if there’s something I’d like to see a little more, it’s that we perhaps push the boundaries of that caution a little bit more.
It won’t happen, I don’t think, because I think we would see a few more instances like that moment in the first half on Saturday when Hwang was suddenly through on goal because we had every player bar-Raya on the edge of their box. I will bet anyone hard cash (not that we’d ever truly find out) that Arteta has re-watched that moment about 50 times and will be replaying it to his team this week in training for sure. There will be a “if you feckers EVER do anything like that again, Imma whip yo’ asses so hard…” talking to at London Colney this way for sure.
The positive I did take from reading this Telegraph article yesterday was that it appears the players are self-serving now when it comes to critical analysis. Arteta will be mad, but he’ll also be internally pleased that the players know when the standards haven’t been met and reading this gave me comfort that they will all be doubling down their efforts this week to ensure there isn’t a repeat of the Wolves situation.
But that doesn’t quite put what I believe is the final puzzle piece in place to take Arsenal to the level where even City are shrugging their shoulders in disbelief that they can catch us. We had it about six weeks ago without the volume of injuries and the clean sheets were being racked up. But that was never sustainable. So I do think we need to find a way to unlock more first half goals. And that’s something I hope Arteta, the coaching staff and the analysts, are all working on trying to fix.
Right, that’ll be it for today I think, so have a good one and I’ll catch you all tomorrow.