Kepa Arrizabalaga was always going to start the League Cup final. He’d played every game in the competition up till then. This is the deal a lot of clubs make with their backup goalkeeper. Still, the thought of betraying Kepa and picking David Raya must have haunted Mikel Arteta in the days leading up to the game. In the end the Arsenal manager chose the honourable course.
He won’t make that mistake again. Kepa’s performance underlined Raya’s standing as arguably Arsenal’s real player of the year. While Gabriel’s threat at set pieces and Declan Rice’s wicked way with an inswinging corner have been the most dazzling attributes showcased in this title-chasing campaign, Raya’s consistent excellence in goal makes him the one truly indispensable player.
Rayan Cherki’s cross looked overhit and might have gone out for a throw on the far side had Kepa not reached up and fumbled an attempted catch, sending the ball floating softly into the goalmouth for Nico O’Reilly to bundle into the net.
It was the kind of goal this final deserved. Without somebody making a huge mistake, it was hard to see how anybody was ever going to score.
The fault for this lay mainly with Arsenal, whose wretchedly risk-averse approach was more than a disappointment for spectators. It was an indictment of the 2025/26 Premier League season. If this is the best team in England then the game is in a sorry state.
The pattern of the first half was summed up in a sequence around the 25-minute mark. Arsenal had the ball at the back, Saliba passed to Gabriel, Gabriel to Saliba. They were baiting the press in the style that has become numbingly familiar since Roberto De Zerbi’s brief reign at Brighton. But the thing about baiting the press is that it only works if the other team is naive enough to take the bait. City’s frontline players simply stood 15 yards away and watched.
After a minute or so of absolutely nothing happening, somebody panicked and booted it up the pitch straight to the feet of Bernardo Silva. City had the ball back and maybe Arsenal preferred it that way.
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta after the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. Photograph: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta after the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. Photograph: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images
What Arsenal fear more than anything is giving the ball away in an unexpected way, and with counterattackers of the calibre of Antoine Semenyo and Erling Haaland in the other team you can understand the need for caution. But playing with this much caution stops you from developing any flow in the game.
The thing is that Arsenal don’t actually want flow, they want set pieces. But City did well in choking off chances from that supply route. They conceded only three corners and gave Rice just four chances to put the ball into the box from direct free-kicks. City even denied Arsenal the chance to fling in many long-throws – two for Rice, one for Riccardo Calafiori.
[Champions League: Declan Rice and Eberechi Eze pick off Bayer Leverkusen as Arsenal cruise into quarter-finalsOpens in new window ]
City at least had the confidence to take the ball and pass it, though they struggled to create chances against the 10-man Arsenal defensive block. Only Semenyo seemed to have the energy to successfully attack his opponent one on one. Semenyo, of course, wasn’t playing Champions League football in the first half of the season.
The elimination of four out of six English teams in the second round of the Champions League prompted some theorising on what might be causing the problems. Tiredness is the traditional answer and yes, it is a factor, though one that is compensated for by the Premier League clubs’ enormous economic advantage.
Some have even tried to argue that it is precisely because the Premier League is so strong that its leading teams appear so weak. City didn’t have the luxury of slacking off against West Ham before they played Real Madrid, etc.
A more persuasive theory is that the Premier League’s real point of difference is the refereeing. Howard Webb, the head of Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL), was watching this dull final from the royal box. Does he ever reflect on the damage his organisation’s refusal to enforce basic rules has done to the sport in England?
Ange Postecoglou recently made the point that ever-more-frequent stoppages are making it harder to play a running attacking style, which is dependent on flow. Instead the game is being broken up into ever more discrete, scriptable chunks.
Manchester City players celebrate with the Carabao Cup trophy at Wembley Stadium on Sunday. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
Manchester City players celebrate with the Carabao Cup trophy at Wembley Stadium on Sunday. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
Thanks to VAR and Webb, it has become rational for Premier League teams to focus on a stop-start game based on winning set pieces where they can pin the goalkeeper, knowing that Webb’s ref will turn a blind eye. The rest of the world is still playing by the old rules, where the referee whistles anything that looks like a maul in the goalmouth.
Arsenal’s campaign has become reminiscent of Leicester’s in 2016, without the attendant astonishment and excitement. The thing they have in common is not so much about what’s happening on the pitch. Like Leicester, Arsenal’s strength is based on solid defence, but they don’t have any players performing at the levels Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez or N’Golo Kanté showed in 2016.
The similarity is that they are winning the league by default, with all the usual rival clubs engulfed in various states of chaos.
City showed on Sunday that they are stronger than Arsenal head-to-head, but they have failed to show it consistently. As the rest of the Premier League teams have repudiated his once-dominant style, Guardiola has looked a dispirited figure.
Last week, in the effort to hype up the final, journalists had tried to prod him into saying something controversial about Arteta, his former assistant. One inquiry took the route of reminding Pep that some of his players had criticised Arsenal for employing “dark arts”.
Guardiola responded with the rare expedient of putting football into a wider perspective. “Look at what is happening around the world. We become incredible chaos, and nobody move one finger ... The world is going to collapse and still we are here talking about dark arts.”
He was right. The world is sliding into war, none of this matters. We only do it to amuse ourselves. So maybe Guardiola doesn’t need to scowl and shake his head if Rayan Cherki decides to juggle the ball a few times when he finds himself 2-0 up in a boring cup final. And maybe Arteta and his many imitators could try to remember that football without fun is nothing.