There are a great many things that Manchester United have got wrong over the past 12 years, but for the neutral, becoming this frightfully boring is perhaps the greatest of their crimes. We have seen community walking football games for elderly men played with more intensity than United managed here.
But Mikel Arteta needs to be careful not to fall into the same trap – not just for entertainment value, but because his side’s odd shift into an overly-conservative approach is hurting their performances.
You’d think that after scoring seven in midweek, Arsenal would be brimming with brio and willing to come out of the blocks against a United side whose abject mediocrity is beyond well-established by this point. Instead, Arsenal played their own large part to create a somnolent atmosphere inside Old Trafford until Bruno Fernandes opened the scoring with a direct free kick in first-half stoppage time.
Arteta’s side were consistently better at making ingress into the opposition box, but their lack of any kind of quality touch having got there left Andre Onana with little of real note to do, Declan Rice’s eventual equaliser being unstoppably smashed beyond his reach.
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Wrestling fans are fond of chanting ‘booooring, booooring’ at matches that don’t take their fancy, and we’d like to hear it more from football grounds, too. But in this instance, that actually suited United; if it had been an out-and-out slugfest, you would surely have favoured Arsenal to triumph.
Yet this season, Arteta has been bizarrely unwilling to let them off the leash. Where before they looked like a side who had taken the best of what the manager had learned under Pep Guardiola before and put his own spin on it.
We have, in all fairness, seen that on occasion this season: against West Ham, against Crystal Palace, against Manchester City themselves.
But all too often, Arsenal instead look like they have taken the heavily systematised football of City and strictly imposed it on a team of players who are afraid to deviate from their instructions. On those days, there is no sense of spontaneity or free thought about their play whatsoever.
For all the noise around their lack of a proper good centre-forward, that has been a far bigger issue for Arsenal, and the reason they lag so far behind league leaders Liverpool. Arne Slot’s side have faced similar criticisms about their centre-forward options but have thrived. Just to provide a helpful counterpoint, Manchester City have arguably the best striker in the world, yet have struggled.
The loss of Bukayo Saka offers a very reasonable excuse for that: the injured winger has not played since before Christmas but remains joint-second in the Premier League’s assist charts, with 10 (behind Mohamed Salah, of course). Arsenal’s average xG has dropped by a third in his absence, from 1.72 per game to 1.29 coming into this trip to Old Trafford.
Arsenal lack anybody even approaching Saka’s quality to pick up the slack – but all the more reason for Arteta to free up a little more license in the final third. He has the best defence in the Premier League, and less to fear than any other manager about the downsides of taking off that handbrake.
Arteta would no doubt point out that Rice’s goal was a perfect example of why he does things the way he does: a complete training ground move that resulted in the midfielder arriving unmarked into the box to thrash into the far corner.
The question is whether Arsenal might have won this game – and others like them – if they were able to shift into something a little less robotic when the occasion calls for it.
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