Mikel Arteta & Pep Guardiola on the touchline at Wembleyplaceholder image
Mikel Arteta & Pep Guardiola on the touchline at Wembley | AFP via Getty Images
Arsenal’s EFL Cup final defeat to Manchester City wasn’t just boring - it was a worrying indictment of their chances of winning a title.
Both Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta have often approached the opening stages of big matches in a conservative manner. Usually, that takes the form of a cautious passing game, a gradual establishment of control with risk kept to a bare minimum. During Sunday’s EFL Cup final, however, the result was an absolute refusal to allow the opposition even the slightest chance to play anything resembling attractive football.
The first half featured blood, thunder and a certain amount of brutality, an endless succession of little hacks and late tackles and elbows in the back. It also featured very little skill or flair. It was a game which had the finesse strangled out of it. It was entirely tedious to watch.
Manchester City fans won’t be too fussed about all that. They have another trophy for a cabinet which is probably taking up too much room at the Etihad by now. Arsenal, on the other hand, were both boring and unsuccessful – and it’s worth wondering whether the two might go hand in hand.
The dullness of Arsenal’s EFL Cup final defeat should worry them
There is plenty of irony in the fact that Guardiola, the great aesthete of the modern game, and his former disciple would combine to engineer a game which would have felt more appropriate had it been played on a mudbath pitch in the 1980s. Or perhaps the Colosseum in 80AD. Were you not entertained? Probably not. Tiki-taka feels like an awfully long time ago.
It was Guardiola’s old Barcelona team that Arne Slot harked back to three weeks ago when he talked about the way that Premier League football was “not a joy for [him] to watch” any more as the focus of the top flight moves from possession, pressing and open-field football to set pieces and marginal gains.
Slot was mostly frustrated by the increasing predominance of set piece plays as the strategic focus of top teams (his own Liverpool side included, of course), but there is little doubt that the prevailing strategic winds of English football are heading in a duller direction. The average number of goals per game has declined in successive seasons from 3.28 per game in 2023/24 to 2.73 this season.
Arsenal, meanwhile, have been below the average for each of the last few campaigns and have dipped to an average of 2.68 goals per game despite having had something of a stranglehold on the league lead for many months. It’s a statistic which feeds into the broader sense that they lack a degree of daring under Arteta, something which was also in evidence when they dropped points in successive games against Wolves and Brentford in February after becoming desperately defensive after taking the lead.
Nobody could argue that Arsenal are a poor side, or that they haven’t earned their perch at the top of the table, but it’s becoming increasingly evident that they aren’t an especially ruthless or aggressive side either. They have defensive solidity and technical quality in abundance, but little desire to attack, to take chances, or to find fresh angles from which to come at their opponents. The brutal truth is that they are a little dull to watch.
Success in football is not, of course, determined solely by whether everyone involved had fun. If Arsenal come out of this campaign with a trophy or two, nobody at the Emirates will give a damn about the entertainment factor. But the seemingly wilful dreariness of their approach may also hold them back in games when they need to go for the kill, or to innovate the means by which to get through a particularly stubborn opponent.
Arsenal’s lack of fresh ideas suggests that winning trophies may not be a formality
It was fitting, perhaps, that the game was essentially decided not by a piece of skill or class, but by a mistake – a cross fumbled by Kepa Arrizabalaga, a man who seems to be addicted to making a spectacle of himself during the EFL Cup final. Once Nico O’Reilly stole in to head that unexpectedly loose ball home, the game was essentially over. His second was almost entirely unnecessary.
Partly, that’s because one thing that Guardiola hasn’t forgotten from his Barcelona days is how to keep his foot on the opposition’s throat. The audacious interweaving passing plays of his best sides may be a thing of the past, but Manchester City know exactly how to keep the ball an arm’s length away from the opposition. Arsenal would have been chasing shadows had they bothered chasing anything at all.
But it’s also in part because Arteta and his team demonstrated an amazing lack of grit and bravery throughout the game. In the first half, there was at least a reasonable justification for all the circumspection. In the second, 2-0 down and in need of something special, they just continued to get behind the ball in numbers, allow City to dictate the tempo, and play as though it were 0-0. It’s hard to see what Arteta actually expected to happen.
There was no evident change of gameplan, no shift of attacking focus – frankly, little attacking focus at all – and a tangible sense of frustration. It made Arsenal look like a team who lacked the fight for a difficult match, and the sheer willpower required to overpower teams who don’t give them the space to play their best football.
It wasn’t just a poor performance, it was petulant. The needless booking Ben White picked up for knocking Rayan Cherki over after the Frenchman showboated his way through a few keepy-uppies on the touchline seemed to sum Arsenal’s attitude up. It was also by far the most entertainment they provided all evening.
Boring, boring Arsenal are back, and while they win plenty of matches there’s a valid question about whether they really do have the gumption to break that six-year streak without silverware. One wonders how this squad would handle it if they do miss out – especially if they end up caving in the Premier League.
Even with a nine-point lead, that remains a realistic possibility. They still have to play Manchester City at the Etihad, and Guardiola’s side have a game in hand. Lose that match in just under a month’s time and the entire complexion of the title race could change. Arteta and his side will need to show they have the guts to match their technical skill if they want to get over the line.
Right now, it’s all too easy to see Manchester City winning that match on 19 April. It’s all too easy to wonder just how Arsenal will cope if they find themselves in a similar situation against a side like Barcelona, Real Madrid or PSG in the Champions League. The draw has been kind to them in Europe, but they will have to overcome adversity at some point – and their lack of flair and ability to add some originality to their game, especially going forward, suggests that they may struggle to manage that.
At Wembley, all their supine showing did was offer City sincere cause to believe that they can still take another top-flight title and hard evidence that they are the better of the two teams. O’Reilly himself has told the press that his side can “smell blood” as they work to narrow the gap. Arsenal can be boring if they like, but they can’t be cowardly as well. Not if they want to put their fans in a position where they don’t need to care about whether anyone else enjoyed watching them or not by the end of May.
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