Havertz impresses, Martinelli dismays, and Manchester City are now neck and neck with Arsenal in the title race.
I have been dreading this game for days. The night before Arsenal’s trip to Manchester City on Sunday, I failed to sleep more than a few hours. I tossed and turned. I dreamt of embarrassing scorelines and Erling Haaland daggers (no, I did also dream about the winning lotto numbers). I woke up repeatedly before giving up on any resumption of my slumber and began my Sunday at six in the morning. Needless to say, I was a nervous wreck by the time the Gunners kicked off at the Etihad.
Despite a very savvy starting lineup lifting my spirits somewhat, I never harbored any serious expectation of victory. Depending on what your current state of mind is you may view this as excuses, but the odds were stacked against Arsenal here. They entered the match without three key players in Jurriën Timber, Riccardo Calafiori, and Bukayo Saka. Mikel Arteta’s men were in a terrible run of form while City had clicked in a big way at the perfect time. And Arsenal’s record away to the big northern clubs continues to not making for fun reading. My fingers were crossed for a draw and I hoped to be quite pleasantly surprised.
So when Rayan Cherki produced a moment of brilliance to give City the lead, I tried to accept Arsenal’s fate. Then Kai Havertz quickly equalized and pulled me back in. When the score remained tied at 1-1 entering halftime, I found myself even more panicked than before, just wanting to know how it would end. And when Haaland fired home that winner, something deep inside me knew that was probably that. Sure enough, City took all three points when Anthony Taylor blew the whistle for full time.
On the one hand, I am just so incredibly sad. Arsenal were nine points clear just over a week ago. Now, they’re ahead by three while City have a game in hand — an away trip to Bournemouth in midweek which they will almost certainly win. Pep Guardiola’s men have control over their destiny, which Arteta’s charges have handed to them. And we know what usually happens when that is the case at the business end of the season.
Forget the noise online. The Arsenal water bottles, the conspiracy theories about Arteta, the amateur psychological diagnoses, all of that is just people vying for attention they’re not getting in real life and failing to healthily process their emotions. But I am tired of finishing second. I am tired of not getting trophies over the line. I am tired of things going wrong in the end and never having the last laugh. To grapple with the increasing possibility that another season could go that way threatens a pain I do not wish to describe right now.
But more than that, I’m tired of City. This is a team that stand accused of over 130 charges of financial impropriety, of self-dealing that has allowed them to wield an effectively endless budget and to conceal that alleged duplicity for the better part of 15 years. If the supposed misconduct is indeed happening, they are funneling the wealth of a nation-state into the club via bogus sponsorships so that they can offer astronomical salaries to the best players in the world (their wage bill is currently 20% larger than Arsenal’s), so that they do not suffer if they spend big on the wrong footballers as they have recently, so that they can spend nine figures in January and go again without any consequences. And that’s to say nothing of the small matter of City’s owner being linked to the funding of a genocide.
Not only has this all been allowed to happen, but it has been normalized to a chilling extent. As Bayern Munich clinch their 35th Bundesliga title, as PSG yet again top the Ligue 1 table, Premier League fans are egging City on to win yet another championship. They have welcomed their new cheater overlords enthusiastically, with the excuse that it’s better than Arsenal’s oh so annoying fans being happy for a summer. Pundits choose to crack jokes at the Gunners’ expense rather than interrogate the eroding of English football’s integrity because the former gets them more clicks. City have pulled off the greatest-ever feat of sportswashing, and Arsenal are among those paying the hefty price for it.
And yet, this title race is still far from over. And that’s the note I want to end this prologue on. Yes, Sunday’s loss was gutting. Yes, it is going to be a long fucking week and I urge you to stay off non-Bluesky social media as much as possible. Yes, City have that look in their eyes that says they think they’ve wrapped this up. But Arsenal can very much still win this. As Declan Rice said to Martin Ødegaard at full time, it’s not done.
With five games left in the league, the mission is clear: win out from this point forward. City have the trickier set of remaining fixtures and they are a younger team featuring a multitude of newer faces. It’s quite possible they slip up at some point between now and the end of May. Arsenal have to put the pressure on them to be perfect from here on out.
Entering Sunday, I wouldn’t have been positive about the Gunners’ ability to do that. But, disregarding the result, I found Arsenal’s performance at the Etihad rather encouraging. They could have won that game on another day; they certainly wouldn’t have lost if the aforementioned missing starters had been available. With Havertz, Ødegaard, and Eberechi Eze all on the pitch together, Arsenal were able to build threatening attacks with regularity. They generated slightly more xG than the hosts, and just as many big chances. City were lucky not to concede more than one goal (although it might be fair to say Arsenal were lucky not to concede more than two). All they needed was what has been their Achilles’ heel throughout Arteta’s tenure: the ruthlessness in the opposition box to make the biggest moments count.
But against Newcastle, Fulham, West Ham, Burnley, and Crystal Palace, that level of efficiency probably won’t be as important as volume of chances. And with that trifecta of attacking players and hopefully the return of Timber, Calafiori, and Saka on the horizon, I think Arsenal are more than capable of winning all of those games if they show the level they did in Manchester on Sunday. I have to believe they are. Because if they aren’t, perhaps they’re not the team I thought they were.
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Ballers
Kai Havertz
If you had asked any Arsenal fan in the buildup to this match what the most crucial adjustment in the Gunners’ starting lineup needed to be, almost all of them would have said that Havertz needed to start at center forward. And they would have been right. The German relieved Viktor Gyökeres of his duties as striker for the Etihad trip and to my eye impacted the match in a big way. Up against Marc Guéhi and Abdukodir Khusanov, Havertz exploited his superior height to a greater advantage than Gyökeres was able to achieve with brute force and speed in the Carabao Cup final. Havertz won half of his ten aerial duels, serving as a reliable outlet when Arsenal needed to go long.
Generally, I thought he was magnificent off the ball. Havertz chased after every lost cause, refused to shy away from physical contests, and pressed doggedly for the entirety of the match. He emptied the tank against City, and he expended his energy intelligently. The Arsenal forward was rewarded for those efforts, catching Gianluigi Donnarumma as the City keeper attempted to clear the ball and deflecting it into the goal to even up the score.
There were shortcomings, of course. Havertz missed three big chances over the course of the match, with two of those opportunities feeling like sliding-door moments. First there was his attempt in the 60th minute after an Arsenal fast break and an Ødegaard ball that put the German in on goal. But Ødegaard’s pass was a little overhit, Havertz had to shoot on the stretch from a somewhat narrow angle, and Donnarumma saved. Then, in stoppage time, Leandro Trossard whipped in a lovely cross from the right flank that Havertz got his head on. But he glanced the shot over the bar, wasting Arsenal’s final chance of the match.
Those are certainly moments that we may come to look back on with regret. And it does point to a desperate need, no matter the outcome of this season, for the Gunners to go and sign some truly lethal forwards in the summer. But I think it’s also important to say that it does count for something that Havertz got into those positions in the first place. We’ve spent the season watching Gyökeres regularly go without registering a single shot on target, precisely because he lacks the wherewithal to exploit space the way Havertz does. Five more games of that from the German and I think it could mean glory for Arsenal.
Eberechi Eze
Starting at left wing on Sunday, I thought Eze was perhaps Arsenal’s biggest threat. With Piero Hincapié deployed at left back, the Englishman was allowed to drift inside and help add to the Gunners’ creative play from central positions. For instance, Eze combined with Ødegaard on the counter to manufacture Havertz’s attempt on goal in the 60th minute. He had some other moments where he almost created an opportunity for Havertz but was barely foiled by an interception or the offside flag.
Of course, his biggest contribution came in the 61st minute. Eze received the ball at the top of City’s box before turning and curling a shot at goal with his left foot. As we all know now, the Arsenal no. 10’s attempt would cannon off the inside of the post, but not into the back of the net. But that moment reemphasized something every Arsenal fan should know about Eze at this point: he has the ability to change a match on a dime.
While there were moments where his play was a little sloppy (and I do think he played a part in allowing City’s first goal to happen), I believe that ultimately Eze was a net positive at left wing. Arteta’s decision to substitute him in the 74th minute was disappointing. Something tells me he could have offered another moment of magic late in Sunday’s match. But his performance bodes well for what he could give Arsenal down the final stretch.
Martin Ødegaard
Ødegaard returned to the starting lineup after missing the previous two matches due to injury. Immediately, he had a beneficial impact on the Arsenal team. In the Carabao Cup final, City had made easy work of the Gunners in the second half by executing a four-man screen that rendered Arsenal’s buildup from the back utterly ineffective. Ødegaard ensured that his side could play through Guardiola’s men on Sunday, dropping into Arsenal’s third to receive the ball on occasion and amplifying the team’s progressive play.
In addition to that, he also served as Arsenal’s primary chance creator. The Norwegian ended the game with four chances created, including his aforementioned through ball to Havertz. He also finished with three passes into the final third and half of his six long balls completed.
All in all, it wasn’t spectacular. Ødegaard clearly was still trying to get back to his best at the business end of a campaign that has been plagued by injury. But even when he wasn’t at the peak of his powers, he instantly got Arsenal clicking when it came to moving the ball up the pitch. If he can stay fit for this final leg of the season, his partnership with Havertz, Eze, and hopefully others can prove fruitful.
Fallers
Noni Madueke
Unfortunately, it was another match in which Madueke failed to make a discernable impact. The Englishman started once again in place of the injured Saka, and didn’t really produced any dangerous moments. He created no chances, left the pitch with zero shots, and none of his three crosses (including two corners) found their targets. And at the end of the day, you need to make an impact in these moments.
What’s even more concerning in my opinion was an apparent departure from his bread and butter. Madueke is a tall, strong, fast player who’s really good at one thing: driving at defenders and causing chaos. And he just didn’t seem willing to have a go at O’Reilly on the day. Everything he did was slowed down. Instead of firing in first-time crosses, he would hold the ball on the flank, do a couple shimmies, and then play the ball back out to the half-space.
On top of that, I was not convinced with his defensive work. It was certainly better than what he showed against Bournemouth, but there were still moments when Cristhian Mosquera needed a hand and didn’t get it. Ultimately, it was very understandable that Arteta wanted to withdraw him at halftime.
Gabriel Martinelli
To put it bluntly, I thought Martinelli was rather abysmal when he replaced Noni Madueke to start the second half. To me, I saw it as a move made with the intention of solidifying the defensive support on Arsenal’s right flank, especially with Mosquera on a yellow card while defending against Jérémy Doku. Martinelli is a forward who typically works quite hard in defensive; in midweek he produced a phenomenal defensive intervention against Sporting, running most of the pitch back toward his goal to force an opponent off the ball and help keep his side ahead. But on Sunday, the Brazilian offered none of that and also made some poor choices on the ball.
One of his first contributions was to trigger a dangerous City counter by playing a sloppy ball squarely across the pitch. I’m pretty sure he was aiming for Ødegaard, but considering a relative lack of pressure and the Norwegian being in some space, the execution from Martinelli there was so poor. He then followed that up by almost handing City a point-blank shooting opportunity from a corner; in his own box, the winger chested the ball instead of clearing first-time and turned into Nico O’Reilly, who almost capitalized.
Unfortunately, Martinelli’s lack of awareness on the day resulted in real consequences. In the 65th minute, he allowed O’Reilly — his man, whom he was brought on to help nullify — to carry the ball the length of the pitch unimpeded. The City man then pulled Martín Zubimendi out of position before firing a low cross into the box that Haaland hit home to win the points for the hosts.
It was just such a poor half from Martinelli. These are the details that can make or break title charges. And as we approach what feels like an imminent changing of the guard within this Arsenal team, I can’t help but feel that the Brazilian should be among those who should go.
Gabriel
Unfortunately, Martinelli wasn’t the only Brazilian who had a bad day at the office. The center back also was found wanting at a crucial moment in Arsenal’s season. For City’s first goal, I wasn’t at all convinced by how Gabriel defended against Cherki’s run into the box. He wasn’t the only player who attempted to stop the Frenchman, but I felt he was the best positioned to do so and the defending he produced was a little weak.
Gabriel was also a little culpable for City’s second. He allowed Haaland to beat him O’Reilly’s ball across the box, which the Norwegian put past David Raya. For this sequence, I am a little more sympathetic toward Gabriel; Haaland had a handful of the Brazilian’s shirt and yanked him around a bit before pouncing onto the pass, but at the end of the day I think Gabriel either should have made more of that potential foul or tried to be a little stronger and not let the City striker bully him there.
What I’m really disappointed about though is how Gabriel lost his cool late in the game. After grappling with Haaland for the umpteenth time, the forward shoved him in frustration, prompting a bust-up between the two. And as they clashed, Gabriel moved his head toward Haaland’s in what could only be described as an attempted headbutt. Frankly, he’s lucky the referee decided just to card both players and move the match along. Because there are plenty of officials who would have jumped at the opportunity to send Gabriel off for violent conduct, which would have seen him banned for the next three league games. And that is the last thing Arsenal need right now.
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