Arsenal remain a team of two halves as they survive another Premier League high-wire act

· Football365

Everything is in place for Arsenal to walk the Premier League title this year. Perhaps that’s why they seem keen to make things interesting?

For much of this season, Arsenal have been playing a game of two halves. So often soporific and pedestrian in the first half of Premier League games before eventually forcing their way to victory in the second.

It’s worked undeniably well, but has often felt like Arsenal making life unnecessarily hard for themselves. Last weekend’s fraught 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest pushed the approach to its elastic limit, their late winner eventually coming from a heavily-deflected Noni Madueke effort that was their only shot on target.

So what we can say about this 2-0 victory over Everton, kicked off by a seventh-minute Ezri Konsa goal, is that Arsenal at least showed a change of plan.

But while this one wasn’t quite a game of two halves, Arsenal remain very much a team of two halves.

David Raya did, admittedly, endure a few skittish moments in goal today as is his occasional wont. But he collected another largely facile clean sheet as his customary wont. Arsenal’s defence, even the in absence of William Saliba, remains elite, and there’s very little wrong with the midfield either.

But then there’s the attack. In the absence of Bukayo Saka, who may well have been irreparably damaged by Mikel Arteta’s relentless overuse of him in the last few years, it becomes mischievously possible to make the case for Max Dowman being Arsenal’s most compelling attacking player.

Certainly he gave the crowd more excitement as a late sub here than anyone who’d come before him.

These are barely criticisms, of course, given where Arsenal sit in the league. We wouldn’t be this harsh about almost anyone else grinding out a 2-0 win over Everton. Arsenal know what they’re doing and how they want to do it. This team, built on resilience that snuffs out pretty much all non-Brighton threat, will wear down almost anyone in the end and find a goal from somewhere at some point. Again, with the Brighton caveat.

And it will probably be enough for them to defend their league title. If Manchester City get a punishment this season that sticks, it will almost certainly be enough.

But that’s just it. Arsenal aren’t almost anyone else.

Is it so wrong of us to just want something with a bit more meat to it? The valid Arsenal response is two-fold. First, most Premier League teams now play them with defence their first, second and often only priority. Arsenal’s attack does feel like a very resistible force, which perhaps kids teams on to try and stop them in a way that they know wouldn’t have much hope of working against, say, Manchester City, where Aston Villa showed the way earlier today.

Even more validly, Arsenal will point to the fact it’s on the rest of the league to come up with a better way to do things, not them. This approach is working its arse off for the Gunners, so who cares?

But dearie me, this attack can look so alarmingly ponderous at times given how good Arsenal are, how great everything else about the team can look.

Viktor Gyokeres did pick up an assist for the magnificently scruffy and extremely 25/26 Arsenal opener, eventually hustled home by Ezri Konsa for his first Arsenal goal. Arsenal centre-back from a set-piece? The game has never been more back.

The second goal was headed home by Gabriel, a stunning bit of rope-a-dopery just minutes after Arsenal’s season hit what looked like a genuine crisis point when he went down injured after apparently twisting his knee. That really would have tested the Gunners’ preferred strategy.

Minutes later, he was making the points safe as Arsenal went level with Man City (and therefore, who knows, perhaps 60 points clear) at the top of the table.

The identity of the goalscorers is enough to tell you a lot about this Arsenal performance. The second did, in fairness, come from a decent move. But it still came down to a cross from one defender and a header from another.

Both Arsenal goals and three of their four attempts on target in this game came from their two centre-backs. Mikel Merino, Declan Rice, Noni Madueke and Eberechi Eze had 11 attempts on goal without working the goalkeeper. Throw Gyokeres and his second-half replacement Kai Havertz in there and it’s, well, it’s still 11 attempts on goal without working the goalkeeper.

It could have cost them today. Thierno Barry, inevitably, should have done far better when presented with a chance by a loose White header. And that’s the thing; for such a good team, Arsenal do seem intent on spending a vast chunk of this season only ever one mistake away from trouble.

Arsenal continue to turn games into more daring high-wire acts than need be the case. But they remain defiantly, compellingly upright in a Premier League season full of pratfalls and stumbles.

Read the original

People in this story

Related