“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete”— Philip Larkin, Church Going
In 1953, the heads of America’s largest tobacco companies gathered at the Plaza Hotel, the French château-style landmark on Fifth Avenue that Donald Trump would later buy. They met to agree on a joint communications plan. Scientific evidence was building into a consensus that smoking caused lung cancer, and the barons of the industry wanted to manage the public fallout. The idea was to form a joint working committee and respond to this science with some ‘science’ of their own. The result was a sustained media barrage, including full-page advertisements such as “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,” which ran in 448 publications and questioned the evidence linking smoking and illness.
This approach lasted decades, with untold sums spent on campaigns that contradicted what the companies knew internally. In 1963, a Brown & Williamson executive wrote to colleagues that nicotine was addictive. In 1969, another memo put the entire plan in writing.
“Doubt is our product,” the memo said, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Those companies bought themselves time. It wasn’t until the 1990s that their curtain wall was breached by a critical mass of legal challenges, culminating in billions in settlements.
In 2017, some 18 years after the government’s 1999 lawsuit and 64 years after the initial meeting at the Plaza Hotel, the companies ran full-page ads again, this time under a court order. A judge demanded new ads about the dangers of cigarettes. The ruling required each company to mention they had “deliberately deceived the … public,” and each ad was to include the phrase “here’s the truth.”
The companies fought against the inclusion of both phrases. Ultimately, the ads ran without them.
The tobacco story was not meant to induce a sense of fatalism about Manchester City and the 114 of 115 charges they were found guilty of. Nor was it meant to imply we should be content to wait much longer. We shouldn’t. I solemnly believe the sanction hammer will swing, swing hard, and swing fairly soon. But just as a defender is taught to delay, delay, delay, to test the opponent’s patience and resolve, such an apparatus is designed to slow things down, to muck them up, “to compete with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public.” Doubt is our product.
In the lead-up to City’s return to the pitch after the … news, I was curious about the football world’s wider response, but also about my own. I expected rage and banter, maybe even a scintilla of joy if their opponents could provide it, as Nicolas Jackson and Yasin Ayari eventually have. But I didn’t expect other feelings to so thoroughly eclipse all of it as I watched them, those of detachment and unreality. The sight of the official Premier League ball bouncing around, ignorantly, as if nothing had happened, and seeing those players, clad in their familiar sponsors, flashing across the screen, all has felt mostly farcical and existential in the end. That is the point, I suppose. Why are they still out there? How long can it last? This is untenable, surely?
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👉 From the first throw-in
Thankfully, we've had meaningful football in the meantime, and more is coming in short order.
The Bayern match was a delightful spectacle.
I admit I felt a little detached while watching us play Fleetwood in the Carabao Cup, too, but for different reasons. While I can talk myself into being excited for these rounds, mainly because you get to watch some players who haven’t featured much, the feeling can wane. I want to win, always. But this time, the waning happened as soon as the lineup dropped, and a sense of resignation came early. This Could Be One of Those Days, followed by, Whatever, We Need the Rest.
A Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyökeres strike partnership is decidedly #notmything, and the other partnerships had their issues, too. I once ranked our possible double-pivot partnerships and put a Lewis-Skelly and Zubimendi duo at the bottom, simply because Lewis-Skelly is at his best when initiating duels in the middle third and Zubimendi is at his best when floating around and causing havoc, too. Without blistering recovery pace from either, that can lead to some transitional issues, and you don’t really want to turn either of them boring. Similarly, Cristhian Mosquera and Marli Salmon both like to move, and Piero Hincapié and Ceadach O’Neill are an, um, untested partnership on the left. Good players still need good dynamics, sure, and that may have been the first issue.
The second and more pressing issue was just the level of application. Like a human A/B test, Martin Ødegaard came on in the second half and showed everybody what they call levels, making crystal clear what the others had been missing.
But who cares. We needed the rest.
I did very much care about the 3-0 loss at Brighton. After that, Arteta reflected on how quickly a vibe seemed to permeate.
“You could see from the first throw-in, it was so clear. We put ourselves in trouble one, two, three times,” Arteta said.
Arsenal weren’t necessarily getting outfought in duels early, but they were misplacing the kind of passes that are usually completed without issue.
Raya started with this.
But then the team settled down, worked through the press, found the free men, and … Bruno promptly passed it back to Brighton.
There were other examples. Plus, they weren’t sprinting, which we’ll get to later.
One can discuss the Brighton performance, our only league loss to date, in the usual, analytical ways. Arsenal had played four away games in ~11 days, including a Champions League trip to Naples and a League Cup tie at Ipswich, before travelling to the south coast. Fabian Hürzeler’s side, meanwhile, brought their absolute best, as they usually have this season. Arsenal were never down by two goals a single time in the league campaign last season, but Brighton, buoyed by maximum energy and also the outer fringes of variance, outclassed us 3-0.
The team then got three weeks to reflect on the travails. After Leeds, Arteta had this to say.
“The last time that we put our shirt on, something was missing, and we need to be very conscious of that. From being exceptional and being the champions to being extremely average, like in that game, it’s a really thin line. So if you don’t want it more than the opponent, you are not able to cope emotionally with certain situations, you’re going to suffer. We all suffered and we didn’t enjoy one bit that game.”
Before Lille, he used an interesting turn of phrase.
“We have to be emotionally dominant regardless of what the context is. It’s easy to say, very difficult actually to do.”
He continued:
“If the game requires a reaction, energy and spirit, a boldness, a courage to deliver something else or change it, that’s the way we have to act. If the game demands everybody to bring the temperature down, we have to be able to do that.”
After Max Dowman’s red card against Fleetwood (fuck off, ref), Arteta used the phrase again.
“We know when we prepare the context of the match, we’re very clear on what to expect. Emotionally, we have to dominate, but we’re very clear.”
I kept toiling over where I’d heard the phrase “emotional dominance” before. Then it hit me. Which means I googled it.
Last year, Arteta appeared on stage with Steve Kerr at an event in London called “The Leadership Playbook.” Kerr is the coach of the Golden State Warriors, and has now won nine NBA championships: 5 as a player, 4 as a coach. He was asked about playing with Michael Jordan.
“He was the most emotionally dominant athlete I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s not close,” Kerr responded. “Obviously, the physical skills were incredible. He’s the greatest player of all time, but there was an emotional dominance that was hard to quantify. **When you were on his team, you knew you were going to win. The other team knew he was going to win. The officials knew he was going to win. And the fans knew he was going to win.**”
In some tunnels, the writing is always on the wall. The best teams, and the best players, have an “of course” feeling about them. Kerr described Jordan as someone who could generate that feeling before the opening whistle, a sense of foreboding that settled over everyone in the stadium.
Arsenal often generate that feeling. They didn’t against Brighton, where something was wrong from the first throw-in. They didn’t really at Fleetwood, either.
Arteta talks a lot about adaptation, and how different the contexts can be for an Arsenal game depending on the competition and the opponent. His stated objective is “that we are the best version of what the game requires … The game required that, and we were the best at that game.” Adaptation makes all the sense in the world on its face. But adaptation is, in its very nature, a response.
The wider picture is an improvement on last season’s results, and three good outings in the Champions League. The Everton and Bayern performances both looked somewhere between good and great. Arsenal have almost always served as the protagonists in a match, and often seemingly dominated proceedings, pinning teams and winning the possession battle. But they’ve also gone 80 minutes without a shot on target, as they did against Forest, and 26 shots with only a goal to show for it, as they did in the League Cup exit. They usually have the ball and the territory, but that may matter less than ever; Arsenal had 60% possession against Brighton, and that hardly felt like dominance.
Jordan’s form of “emotional dominance” wasn’t purely psychological, and it wasn’t primarily because he was willing to suffer as a defender, either. He was also, and I can’t stress this enough, dropping 40 points on their heads.
That’s the final step, as we well know by now. Arsenal’s ability to hold possession and defend is settled science at this point. The question ahead is how the game is changing, how the team is changing with it, whether it’s for the better, and whether the attack can show the kind of dominance that puts games away before the other side has a chance to believe.
👉 A changing league, a tweaked Arsenal
In Go Again back in July, I talked about the squeezing league, which expanded on work by Jon Mackenzie at The Athletic to show that stats like possession, field-tilt, and build-up success were squeezing together. The bottom teams were getting better, and the top teams were finding it more difficult to impose their style of play.
There is another thing at play, and early indications (in a small sample size) are that it’s only accelerating. Basically: some of our old signifiers of “dominant play” may not be as useful anymore.
Again, it’s early days, and a decent amount of this is surely attributable to noise, as a weird game can more easily throw off the numbers. But it’s especially interesting to see numbers like “dangerous losses” move so much, to the point where losing the ball in dangerous spots hasn’t even correlated with being outperformed so far this season. Goals are again down overall. Proportionally, direct styles of play are bearing more fruit.
If some numbers are down, that means other numbers must be up. When I looked around for metrics that showed signs of being increasingly correlated with positive xG difference, they mostly seem to be about raw attacking quality. Things like:
Passes completed above expectation
Through-ball completion
Movement above expectation
Keeping the ball when tackled
Cross completion
(lack of) Errors in back
(lack of) Closing-down mistakes when defending
This does seem to tell a story. What about Arsenal?
For Arsenal’s purposes, the general picture is one of continuation, but there are a lot of quiet differences. The most important is personnel: Konsa in for Saliba, Tzolis in for both Trossard and Martinelli (still a strange thing to type), Bruno in, plus some other fitness considerations with the likes of Ødegaard, Havertz, Saka, and White.
There are other broad strokes. The out-of-possession side is holding up without Saliba. Possession and field-tilt are up. Expected threat has improved while expected goals haven’t followed suit. This suggests the team is generating threatening situations, but that isn’t necessarily turning into threatening shots. Set-piece goals are also down, but underlying performance on those doesn’t look to have suffered too much (which matches the eye test).
…and perhaps most significantly: Arsenal have turned down the press, to a degree I’ve found surprising. Arsenal now start their press from the third-lowest position in the league, ahead of only Hull and Villa. Arsenal are now 7th in passes allowed per defensive action (PPDA), and 16th in total pressed sequences.
The result is a team that is winning the ball back in dangerous positions ~8 fewer times per match. This is inseparable from the other factors, in which Arsenal get more possession while opponents play more direct and long.
But it also seems to involve a larger intent to squeeze the middle third of the pitch instead of getting stretched in every direction. The consequence is all of zero goals from high turnovers, which may impact our impressions of players who thrive in these situations, like Kai Havertz.
But it is still a successful strategy. Opponent build-up is still being stifled, and opponent xG has actually dropped. If you can do that while managing energy, especially early in the season, all the better.
In possession, the passing personnel have changed, and so has the play style.
Arsenal are getting pressured more, playing into pressure more (and more successfully), more likely to go side-to-side with it (which is fine, don’t knock it), and more likely to break midfield lines.
This clip is beautiful, and shows the value of everything from the Konsa and Bruno signings, to Madueke at left-wing.
While I get the sense that Bruno and Rice are still working each other out positionally, I don’t get that sense from Bruno and Ødegaard. They naturally seem to be on the same wavelength.
One of the other “changes,” it must be said, is offsides. Arsenal now lead the league with 28, and have more than doubled year on year (from 1.66 to 3.5). This seems to include many examples where the player is looking right down the line.
This gets especially silly when you consider that Arsenal aren’t especially transitional, and are more likely than others to face lower blocks. Just riffing, but I’d chalk this up to three factors: Kai Havertz (who has always racked up these calls); ambitious passers (Bruno G, Konsa, and even Lewis-Skelly) who don’t always have their timing down with new teammates; and finally, lack of team speed, which we’ll get into next. When you can’t beat the opponent on pure pace, you have to try and sneak a step.
Combine everything, and this results in similar performance levels, but with more points than last year (per CannonStats). It’s awfully nice to see Villa Park, the Stadium of Light, and the City Ground behind us.
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Source: CannonStats.com (subscribe, subscribe)
But there’s more at play.
👉 Walking, running, and sprinting
Running statistics are famously hard to evaluate and prone to confirmation bias. You can’t draw many sweeping conclusions from them in isolation, since almost everything depends on play style, quality, and game state. Running more isn’t necessarily good: on a macro level, there typically isn’t a strong (or any) relationship between distance covered and performance quality. Even high speeds are noisy. They depend on an optimal situation for a player to demonstrate their high speed, and many games don’t reliably provide those.
Still, we know, for example, that an all-out sprint is the action that is most likely to precede a goal. And with the wider context we have about managers and players, I still think we can make some informed hypotheses.
We can see the lack of a link between team quality and top speed in a game setting. Arsenal are probably the best team in the league, and their top-five players have the lowest average top speed per match. Newcastle have the worst xPoints in the whole league, per FotMob/Opta, and are “fastest” by this measure.
We can also see some other things that seem to match the eye test. Arsenal lead the league in running and distance covered, and have outrun their opponents at this almost every game. Manchester United have been outrun in nearly every game, with the margins only widening. In those cases, that seems to … matter.
Arsenal’s top speed of the season was achieved by Mosquera, as we all expected 🙃. No Arsenal attacking player is in the top 50 in the league for top speed. That means no Arsenal attacker has achieved a higher top speed than, say, John McGinn.
Anfield will showcase a clash of styles. Liverpool and Arsenal have gone in different directions from a recruitment and coaching perspective. Liverpool lead the league in sprints; Barcola is the second-fastest player in the division by top speed. Arsenal sprint much less, but jog and run much more consistently, which helps keep positioning fluid and structure intact. The archetypes of that are Calafiori and Ødegaard, who run constantly but rarely sprint.
Another interesting thing: in possession, Arsenal are second in the league in off-ball runs, and first in off-ball runs where the runner actually gets the ball.
Arsenal’s runs in behind and their success rate in finding them have been dropping lately. This coincides with an eye test that says Havertz hasn’t been able to achieve the same intensity as earlier in the season.
But here are my real takeaways and #takes:
Against Brighton, no Arsenal player went faster than 31.4 km/h. That is the lowest top speed recorded by any team in a Premier League match this season, according to my records. This explains a lot.
Madueke, who didn’t play against Brighton, averages 22.9 sprints per 90, which is 4th in the league (of players with as many minutes as he has).
We reinforced earlier that Arsenal are generating threat, but that isn’t fully turning into xG (which, again, is a shot-based metric). I used to bemoan our slow triggers with shots, but I think that’s improved (with Eze, Bruno G, Rice doing what they do, and even Ødegaard shooting quicker). The amount of off-ball runs is clearly in an acceptable spot, as well. My general thought is that a) transitions aren’t spread out enough because the speed isn’t there, and b) boxes stay crowded when opponents aren’t paranoid about the immediate pace of players around them.
This reinforces that, with Martinelli gone, and both Saka and Havertz a bit slower than before, the team has increased its dependency on Madueke in the short term. This was avoidable, and we must address speed as soon as possible, ideally in January.
There’s another prism to look at intensity through.
👉 How Arsenal turn up the pressure
This summer, I looked at how Arsenal have played differently depending on the half and the location. Despite winning three more games than Man City, Arsenal actually spent ~6 percentage points less time leading games, which isn’t an insignificant number.
Writing then:
Arsenal are conservative in first halves, especially away. In the league, Arsenal only scored 12 first-half goals across 19 away matches, and there wasn’t a single away first half with multiple goals. In fact, there were nine away first halves without a goal at all. To elaborate on that:
Man City’s record at half-time in away matches: 10-7-2.
Arsenal’s record at half-time in away matches: 7-9-3.
A rather important corollary to this: it worked. Arsenal were the best away team in the league (15-2-2). Furthermore, they were by far the best second-half team in the league. Arsenal scored the most second-half goals and conceded the fewest, bringing their second-half goal difference to +24. The next highest in the league was +11.
It wasn’t without its stresses.
There was a recurring pattern to Arsenal’s roughest periods. There would be an underwhelming first half, usually with a slightly imbalanced line-up, and, at best, a 1-0 lead. From there, Arsenal would turn to long balls to de-risk the game, control would wane, and the Gods of Variance would show their ugly faces.
The byproduct was that Arsenal spent too much time in 0-0 and 1-0 scorelines, and spent so many late games grinding out results, with the likes of Zubimendi, Rice, and Timber unable to rotate because the result was still in the balance. This had a compounding effect on fitness and injuries, in my view: Zubimendi and Rice both made 55 appearances, and Timber played every minute he could, until he couldn’t. I posted this during Brentford:
“Can one of you please kick in a fucking second goal one of these days so Declan Rice doesn’t have to do (googles good marathoners) Alphonce Simbu shifts until 95’ every week, please?”
This is solved by more cohesive starting line-ups, a little more risk tolerance early, a commitment to keep the ball on the ground after a first goal, and a simple desire to score the second shortly after the first.
Recent pressers have been rife with these mentions of game state.
“Sometimes I’m going to pick a team or players in relation to what I expect, especially at the beginning, that can finish the game, because that’s where most of the games are decided, at this level as well, and we have the bench and the players that are capable of doing that, and we’re going to use, obviously, that resource.”
This split is as extreme as ever. Before this weekend:
Arsenal are, again, the best second-half team in the league on points. And because of this, they are generally happy to turn down intensity, maintain structure, and go to half-time with a level score. This gets extreme away from the Emirates.
In four total away first halves in the league:
Arsenal have yet to score.
Arsenal have been outscored 2-0.
Arsenal have three total shots on target.
The team is generally more aggressive at home, but much of the story remains the same. Before Everton, Arsenal had an even goal differential in the first half, meaning 100% of the advantage was accrued after half-time. To date, they’re 2-5-1, which is good for 8th in the “half-time table.”
As we try to understand what actually changes, the first is the running. As covered earlier, while running is undoubtedly important in general, it can be a false positive: you can run a lot because you’re defending a lot. The more decisive action, the one more likely to lead to a goal, is a sprint. And we see that go up, as we’d expect from the subs and the natural urgency the second half provides. On average, Arsenal have sprinted 11 more times in the second half than in the first.
This is muddied by the subs, but it also reinforces their importance. Subs are more likely to be attackers, and attackers are more likely to sprint.
The difference in liveliness felt downright extreme against Lille.
…and the Eze half-time sub also proved decisive against Villa.
There’s some interesting nuance to all this. While this change in half-time dynamics feels important, there’s probably a healthy bit of randomness in play. Here is some info that points us in that direction:
In first halves, Arsenal have created 6.2 xG and scored 4, while opponents have 1.8 xG and scored 3. Underlying data suggests that Arsenal’s shot quality has been about as one would expect, so keepers are “overperforming,” and/or variance is simply occurring.
In second halves, Arsenal have logged 7.7 xG and scored 9, while opponents had 4.4 xG and scored 2. Arsenal are slightly “overperforming,” while opponents are doing the opposite.
This extends to big chances. Arsenal have only scored on 2 of 11 so-called “big chances” in first halves, and 5 of 9 in second halves.
Last year, Arsenal often opened up first-half game states with one of their record-breaking set-piece goals. On that alone, Arsenal have only scored once (versus Everton) compared to 3.41 xG. While opponents have probably improved their corner defending, the routines look good to me (especially against Chelsea, for example); the moves just didn’t fully come off, which can happen. An early goal from a set piece can change the entire feel of a game.
We see this all play out in the numbers.
This clearly shows a team that turns the risk dial up. The passes go up and back (instead of sideways). The pass accuracy goes down, and the share of the ball in the opposition half goes up, too.
We can see Rice abandoning his perch to underlap and score against Bayern, for example.
There are nerdy tactical ways of looking at this all, but often it boils down to numbers: Arsenal are much more willing to throw an extra man in the box in the second half.
Before the Timber goal, we see Gabriel push up to where a midfielder or a left-back might be, and a sixth man join the frontline.
This is very situational. You’re unlikely to see it as much in away first halves, or in Champions League first halves.
But Arteta deemed it necessary to turn up the risk and pressure dial early against Everton at home, for example.
“Today I thought if they stay in the result or score first and it drags into 60-70 minutes, we have a problem,” said Arteta after the game. “So we spoke about being very aggressive, going for it and imposing ourselves from the beginning of the match.”
…and so you saw these swarms early.
Perhaps the most interesting thing we see in the data is how Arsenal seem much more likely to shoot from deep in the second half.
I’ve watched this clip 500 times.
This one was awfully nice, as well.
Long shots can invite counters the other way. They can get blocked and compel recovery sprints, but they can also cause the exact kind of havoc you need to score goals. As games wear on, defenders are more likely to err.
I’m hesitant to concede it, as I’d prefer to play teams off the pitch early, but I think this strategy has mostly served Arsenal well over these past two years. But I also had a few issues with what we saw last season. The first was that so many line-up drops caused an immediate groan, often featuring a Martinelli/Gyökeres/Madueke frontline that simply didn’t work, making it even harder to luck upon a first-half goal. The second and bigger issue was that Arsenal would often resort to Gabriel/Raya hoofball as soon as a 1-0 lead was obtained. This led to more pressure, more defending, and closer scorelines. Defending is generally viewed as more tiring than attacking, and if it stays 1-0, you become reluctant to take the likes of Rice and Timber out of the game.
Better line-ups (which we’ve seen) and some more composure could go a long way.
Player spotlights
There were a few players I wanted to look at in more depth, starting with…
👉 Rice: playing deeper, and better for it
To help illustrate the Everton setup, I wanted to start with a screenshot of the “base” configuration: Rice at the 6, Lewis-Skelly inverted from LB, Merino at LCM, Ødegaard at RCM. The problem was that it was almost impossible to find.
For any ten-second period, it looked like this. Constant chopping and changing, switching sides and switching heights.
Art de Roché had a typically astute piece about this called Boring Arsenal? No, their midfield carousel can be joyous to watch.
The premise of the piece was informed by Arteta’s post-game presser.
“It’s a team that if you give them clear reference, it’s extremely difficult to break them down. That’s why we had the profile we had in midfield to start with; they decided to become a bit more active, and we understood it really well to occupy the spaces and hurt them in the right moments. It’s the dynamic and understanding that we need from our players, and it will get better and better throughout the season.”
These swirling rotations started immediately, “structure” be damned, and almost immediately led to promising opportunities.
We can see Rice as the highest of the three midfielders here.
That shows how impactful a reset can be, as every defender has to regain their frame of reference. This also happened here, when Arsenal attacked deep, then reset, with Ødegaard far on the right and Merino floating over.
As play reset, there was a 3v2 overload on the right, and every other player was looking to do their normal stubborn blocking. Konsa saw exactly where the space was and pointed to it, as I’ve noticed he often does.
Rice hits Madueke in that half-space, and a great chance soon comes.
These clips show how Rice’s overall involvement has been changing. With Zubimendi playing less and others playing more, he’s been more likely to pop up on the right side.
He’s also playing deeper, dropping back to the RCB spot as needed to punch play forwards from outside the block.
Last year, we covered stuff like this, in which a threatening player was waiting to turn behind every opponent gate.
This year, it’s pretty similar. Rice is dropping from RCM, Bruno hangs behind the first gate, and Ødegaard drops behind the second.
The Athletic has a great video on how this tactic is sweeping the league.
This culminates in a lot of deep action for Rice, as we saw in a maximally involved performance against Forest, in which he went 93/97 (96%) passing.
Rice v Forest
He holds the ball longer, doesn’t play it backwards, and is passing 15+ more times per 90. All of this keeps him in a position to snuff out danger on a ball loss, which couldn’t always be said of his former role as a higher LCM. The trade-off is that he’s a little further from optimal shooting areas.
Gradient grades him as the best player in the league. For any quibbles I have elsewhere, to me, it sure feels like Rice is being used perfectly.
👉 Ødegaard: soaking up pressure
On 50/50 duels last year:
Ødegaard only won 4/26 (15.4%) … At his best, Ødegaard has been on the edge of these physical battles, but this season, he got injured twice while diving into them and looked hesitant to engage after that. It led to some transitions the other way, and was an issue.
My TL;DR of last season was that he kept much of his baseline performance level, especially his passing prowess, but struggled with the timing of releases (particularly in transition), and also had to duck some shoulder-to-shoulder challenges.
He’s improved virtually across the board this year.
He’s staying a bit higher, shooting more (and quicker), and floating to the left a bit. More than anything, he is receiving the ball under pressure a lot more, and doing a better job of it.
👉 Konsa: more calm, more duels
Saliba has big boots to fill, and it’s hard to imagine anyone filling them as ably as Ezri Konsa. The Declan Rice signing provided a feeling of “wow, this is the level of the project now.” That same feeling is provided when remembering Konsa was signed as cover, or whenever Bruno Guimarães is loosening up to come on as a sub.
Konsa scored his first as an Arsenal player.
…and I was struck by how palpable the love for him was.
Still, it’s interesting to look at how much his responsibilities have shifted since his time at Villa Park, and how his performances have differed from those of Saliba last year.
Villa’s shape relied (relies) on vertical compactness and an endless supply of patience. With everybody squeezed together, opponents found it hard to thread passes through the middle, so teams would try to pick out passes over the top, in the space between the backline and the keeper. The result was more likely to be a recovery (often by the GK or the FB) than a duel. As a CB, there wasn’t as much isolated defending.
His duels have gone up by 10 per 90 for Arsenal. Remember this one?
Yes, you do.
He’s also been much more active in the middle third. He’s done well, but there have been a couple of moments where we’ve remembered how easy Saliba makes impossible tasks look.
As a passer, he’s been quite good. Watching the team splay out into position with him in the CCB spot is like a warm blanket. Save Saliba, there is almost nobody else in world football you’d rather have there.
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But Rice and others have also shared those responsibilities, which means it has been harder for Konsa to display his abilities to punch it through. He also may be leaning more conservatively as he eases in. He’s got more line-breakers than he’s shown.
His partnership with Gabriel has looked natural from the start.
In an extension of the cat/dog analogy, I’ve joked before that you want one of your CBs to be Tommy Shelby, smoking and plotting in the office, only masterminding a few important, ruthless decisions (think Saliba or Van Dijk). The other can be his brother Arthur, pacing the streets and hunting for fights, keeping enemies off-balance (think Gabriel or Konaté). If you have two Sphinx-like bosses, your opponent may grow too comfortable out there. If you have two players roaming for trouble, your headquarters will occasionally be left open, no matter how well they scrap. Spurs have been battling this for years with Romero and Van de Ven, and we shouldn’t invite the same issue for months of a critical season.
He has done exactly what we hoped he would, while adjusting to a much more active role as a defender. It feels almost inappropriate to be welcoming back the best CB in world football on top of this.
👉 Raya: the short goalkeeper
Raya’s passing has changed too.
It’s early days, but I think the signs are good. Gradient backs that up with a #1 rating for ball distribution so far.
I’d hoped he would keep the ball on the ground more and hit fewer “clearances disguised as long-balls,” and he mostly has.
He’s also claiming more crosses (1.36 catches per 90, up from 0.53). We once again had a cup exit where he could have easily made the difference. With that one out of the way, I hope to see him in the latter stages of the FA Cup, if we make it.
👉 Havertz: then and now
Kai Havertz felt mostly like his old self in the first few weeks of the season, floating and combining while running everywhere.
He scored in the Community Shield.
He opened the season’s scoring logs against Coventry.
And he reminded everybody of how much he hates Chelsea.
In all three, he scored the type of first-half goal that was too often missing from Gyökeres-led lineups last year.
But I was curious to see if some of the intensity has dipped since then, and it appears so. He only completed 8 sprints against Brighton, then went out with a hamstring strain while on international break, and has since appeared a little less feisty and confident in the duel.
Along the way, most of his key metrics have gone down (though we’re comparing two small sample sizes), while his offsides have gone up. I am preternaturally disposed to shielding Havertz from critique (did you see that run?), but I don’t think those who have noticed a drop in performance levels are making things up. I also believe a few factors are making it harder for him to shine. We’re pressing less, and going long a bit less, too. The other issue is that, with fewer runners around him, we’re more space-constrained.
I do think he’s contributed positively to build-up and advanced interplay, and despite the finishes, he showed at Fleetwood that he could still manipulate space as well as ever. But something’s been a bit off. His game depends on a scrappy intensity, and if that drops, we feel it. This all feels mostly like a physical question, as he still showed his technical levels early in the season, and in moments throughout. If he can regain some of the physicality and the self-belief that comes with it, I have no concerns.
In the meantime, the problem is that the other suitor for the role, Gyökeres, has logged one Premier League shot in 148 minutes this season. I do think I’ve seen him making the “gambling” type of run in the box that wasn’t there last year, and he’s smartly leaned on first-touch passes instead of trying to control it. But still: Merino has logged 8 shots in a similar amount of time. I think Merino should garner a longer look at striker than he has, and I’d still go with Havertz against Liverpool.
👉 Madueke: man of the moment
Noni Madueke has been one of our very best, and most indispensable, players.
Going through footage from the season, I was surprised by how true that was. In addition to the more memorable moments, there were pre-assists and little moves that kicked things off, all stemming from a sense of urgency in all of his actions.
From his right.
This one, too.
So far, this has resulted in:
95th percentile possessions in the box
99th percentile carries creating a half-chance or better
97th percentile chances created
84th percentile successful dribbles
94th percentile dribbles inside
100th percentile successful crosses (!)
81st percentile shots per 90
As I covered earlier, he’s been one of the most active sprinters in the league, and his defensive application has been bullying and stellar.
Over the past year, I was interested to see how efficient he’s been on the left, and those signs are good.
Source: Wyscout
As I’ve said in the past:
More fascinated by Madueke than just about any player. It’s like if you created a winger from scratch and pulled all the attributes to the right. Except: he gets hurt, and usually kicks the ball weird after beating his man. If those things get worked out…
It’s your time, Noni.
🔥 Wrapping up
Many strengths have indeed been fortified since I wrote Go Again. Despite the amount of rotation and new faces, the defensive identity remains intact. Set pieces were seemingly “fortified,” but are probably experiencing some natural downward variance, paired with adjustments from the opposition (yesterday’s price is not today’s price…). Depth and late-game management, so strong last year, feel even stronger now. Also successful is the quest to upgrade the passing bag, while hitting fewer hopeful long balls, especially after gaining a lead. Good, good.
Lineup configurations have generally improved, but we face a different problem now. The issue last year was those all-runny frontlines, but this year, without Martinelli and with some fitness issues elsewhere, we often see the inverse: opponents can crowd the space because nobody is threatening in behind. This’ll require a long-term fix in the squad. For now, it properly turns Madueke into a main character of the season, not to mention the day.
Ahead of Liverpool, we’ve heard a lot about being “the best version of what the game requires,” and Arteta usually has a specific, slow-burn approach when visiting tough away grounds. What awaits is a meeting between the team that sprints the most, and the team that runs the most, between a team Iraola is trying to remake in his image, and a team that is well and truly a reflection of Arteta. I’ll be curious to see when Arsenal turn up the temperature, and if the objective is to display a sense of dominance from the tunnel, or to go more pragmatic, waiting until the second half to throw bodies forward. For however many years it’s been, I’d argue that a (fucking) win is there for the (fucking) taking, and we should approach the game as champions.
I hope you are doing well. Do not forget that I love you.
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