16 Conclusions on Arsenal 5-1 Man City: Havertz Discourse, Haaland numbers, Lewis-Skelly’s humble day

There was a time when Man City sweeping Arsenal aside was the most reliable biannual event on the Barclays calendar. Those days had gone long before this absolutely pasting, but Arsenal 5-1 Man City is still a scoreline to alter the very fabric of Our League.
1. Far be it from us to create a narrative and then spend the rest of our lives defending and reinforcing it – that’s Gary Neville’s job, after all – but that last joyous half-hour for Arsenal felt pretty special and hugely significant.
There was a catharsis about the way Arsenal didn’t just beat Man City but battered them, humiliated them, the fans spending the closing minutes ole-ing and hoping for more goals rather than the sweet relief and release of the final whistle.
Arsenal have had Man City’s number in direct combat over the last couple of years, but it’s never looked like this. They scrapped and fought and stressed their way to a 1-0 win over the champions early last season and then did much the same to secure a goalless draw at the Etihad.
This season they knew then and even more so now that they should have beaten them in Manchester. They made life needlessly hard for themselves and then conceded a gutting late equaliser.
But this was nothing like any of those games. Those games all signified change, but it was a change that showed Arsenal had put themselves at City’s level. This was a game where they showed something new. This was Arsenal doing to City what City used to do to them. This was Arsenal leaving City in the dust.
2. The obvious frustration with that, of course, is that Arsenal finally going past City has occurred in a season when Liverpool have merrily sauntered past the pair of them. This is a huge statement win for Arsenal, one that really does signal a changing of the order of things in English football.
And yet it is still ‘only’ one that keeps them on the fringes of the title race rather than being a coronation. Arsenal fans are having a lot of fun, and rightly so, with Erling Haaland and ‘stay humble’ but he’s not really been proven wrong, has he? Not yet, anyway. But yes, he probably does now know who the f*ck Myles Lewis-Skelly is.
3. Lewis-Skelly’s yellow card before he had even made his Premier League debut in the bad-tempered reverse fixture may no longer be the most infamous card he’s received, but we also now know for sure, if we didn’t already, that this is not a player destined to be remembered only in the dark depths of a Sporcle quiz. He has been superbly and carefully integrated into a very good team and now has an air of permanence that is really quite striking.
His brief debut appearance in that Etihad caper still comprised half Lewis-Skelly’s total Premier League appearances as recently as December. But he has now featured in eight of Arsenal’s last nine Premier League games and started the last four.
There is confidence, sure, and if anyone had any doubt about Lewis-Skelly’s levels there they were surely answered by his decision to mark his beautifully taken goal with a Haaland tribute celebration. But not for the first time he showed here he has what it takes to back that up. His goal was merely the crowning moment of another fine all-round display combining deft and assured defensive responsibility with an ever-present sense of attacking adventure – one his team-mates don’t always seem to share.
There was one particular moment in the first half where a long ball beyond the far post looked destined for Haaland as he got himself an apparent physical mismatch against the Arsenal youngster. But Lewis-Skelly stayed on task and did enough to prevent Haaland even getting a touch, which was itself a recurring theme of the day.
4. Haaland did make one significant mistake, though. Scoring another goal. Bizarre as it seems to say out loud, Haaland’s goal was the turning point in this game. Until then, Arsenal really were kind of sleepwalking through the game after accepting the early gift presented to them by John Stones and Manuel Akanji (on which plenty more later).
It always felt like City were there for the taking. They were so far off it, with their old-man midfield looking every bit as leggy and plodding as your worst fears for them.
Yet Arsenal did not go for the kill. We’re not going to play down the importance or effectiveness of their pressing game and the mistakes into which City were bullied, but too often in the first half that felt like the only club in the bag rather than just one weapon in Arsenal’s, well, arsenal.
Haaland, who spent the game very pointedly trying not to get drawn into nonsense, made the fatal error of poking the bear not by chucking balls around or getting in people’s faces or offering Mikel Arteta unsolicited advice but in the seemingly sensible act of heading City level in the 55th minute of a high-profile Premier League game.
5. From that moment, Arsenal were a completely different beast. Another weak and unwise pass out of defence, this time from Phil Foden, was pounced upon by Thomas Partey who restored the Gunners’ lead via the help of a far more significant deflection off John Stones than the one for Martin Odegaard’s opener.
And from there it quickly and gleefully turned into a rout. Arsenal stopped playing within themselves and realised just how vast their superiority truly was over whatever this iteration of Manchester City is turning into.
There has been improvement from City in recent weeks, but it has come from a disastrously low floor and remained pockmarked with enough reminders to signify all was still not well. And all is definitely still not well.
6. Two Arsenal players deserve mention here for their efforts throughout the game and not just in the giddy release of the late rout. David Raya for preserving Arsenal’s lead into the second half – although thinking about it, maybe if he’d let in an equaliser slightly earlier the Gunners might have had seven or eight by the end – and Declan Rice.
We love Rice in this kind of all-action mode, highlighting the full range of his midfield skills. His pressing intensity was integral to the opening goal and the chance later in the first half from which Kai Havertz really should have doubled Arsenal’s lead.
In the second half, he turned conductor, leading the band and orchestrating so much of the work that would leave City so thoroughly undone.
He was everywhere and did everything, finishing with a pair of assists and four of Arsenal’s nine key passes on the day.
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7. One of the remaining five key passes was played by Kai Havertz and has received one of the strangest reactions we recall. That key pass was the assist for Odegaard’s goal inside two minutes, and we genuinely cannot remember a player copping so much flak, so much heat, for the successful completion of an assist.
Neville started it tentatively at the time and with renewed gusto after his later – admittedly very bad – miss and it all felt a bit unnecessary.
Sure, Havertz could have gone for goal himself, but we struggle hugely with the argument that he was better placed to score than Odegaard, unmarked in the middle of the goal with only John Stones between him and that goal. We’ve all seen strikers miss that kind of chance, and we’ve all heard ‘He’s got to square it, Team-mate X had a tap’in!’ from exasperated co-commentators.
And we’ve all seen players do precisely what Havertz did and be praised for their good team play and unselfishness. Not everything has to be part of a narrative. Sometimes it’s just stuff that happened.
8. But as ever, it really does feel like the noise around Arsenal is constantly turned up to 11. The Havertz Discourse now threatens to become even sillier than the Lewis-Skelly Red Card Discourse last week, in which another further largely unremarkable mistakes and incidents are magnified and multiplied to degrees of absurdity that just can’t be doing anyone any good.
There is definitely something about how emotionally if not necessarily physically exhausting everything seems to be for Arsenal. The idea of every game being a cup final with the attached level of drama. It does sometimes just seem a bit much, doesn’t it? And it appears to be infectious. Arsenal’s own fondness for amplification and exaggeration appears at times equally irresistible to everyone else.
9. There was no need to exaggerate that Havertz miss, though, and yet people still did precisely that. It was really bad, guys. We get that it was really bad. We’re not quite sure about xG Philosophy giving it an xG of 0.77 – literally the same as a penalty – given it was open play, the keeper was closer and there was also defender on the line. But it was about as close to a penalty kick as an open play chance is going to get and he should obviously have scored. For all our sakes, it turned out.
But even then, that is still saying it was a chance that would be missed pretty much one time in four. Players have missed chances like that before Havertz, and will miss them again after Havertz. There will just be less f***ing noise around it all.
As he dragged it wide, you sighed along with the Arsenal fans. The Discourse was upon us and unavoidable. His earlier assist was now not so much the creation of a goal as proof positive of the man’s lack of moral fibre. The fact he had already had a shot on target in the game before passing for Odegaard to – and we really can’t stress this enough – score an actual real-life goal mattered little. He failed to take the shot on because he was frit, that’s what had been agreed. He missed the later chance because he was frit, that’s what had been agreed.
And when he calmly and efficiently slotted home Arsenal’s fourth goal? How did that fit into the whole narrative? Well that’s easy. That was instinctive, you see; didn’t have time to think about it. It wasn’t and he did, and fundamentally sometimes players pass and sometimes they shoot and sometimes that goes badly and sometimes that goes well. But the Discourse must be fed.
10. It was impossible, though, to watch this game and not consider the fascinating contrast between Arsenal’s central striker and Manchester City’s. In the first half one wondered who really is the false nine – the player who doesn’t really look or play like a nine, or the one who is barely playing at all?
Erling Haaland had just six touches in the entire first half, and none between the fourth and 40th minutes. Sky helpfully catalogued his entire first-half contribution in a neat little on-screen graphic.
Those six touches comprised: A block, an unsuccessful pass, an unsuccessful headed pass, a successful pass, being dispossessed and, most tantalising of all, finishing the half with a ‘touch’.
Haaland is, of course, an extreme example of a number nine and he got his goal in the end, albeit at really quite huge cost in the final analysis.
And yes, there are obviously times when Arsenal could do with a big number nine to do big number nine things. But it’s also simplistic to pretend they wouldn’t also lose something, that wanting a player to do Haaland-esque number nine things but also everything else that Havertz offers beyond goals is to demand the moon on a stick.
11. Haaland ended up with nine humble touches, if we’re counting. And when it comes to Haaland, we are always counting. He also scored his 250th senior club goal on his 313th appearance, a total that stands up pretty well against Lionel Messi (327), Kylian Mbappe (332), Harry Kane (430), Cristiano Ronaldo (451) and Robert Lewandowski (451) among select others to reach that landmark this century.
12. A moment too for Gary Neville’s instinctive ‘Wrong way!’ response to Haaland running towards the City fans rather than towards his nemesis Gabriel after his goal. It was a weird encouragement of housery and one Neville spent the rest of the game doubling down on, virtually egging Haaland on to provoking fisticuffs by the end.
You could almost sense the reverie in Neville’s voice, all those old battles with Arsenal down the years rushing back to the forefront of his mind as he urged Haaland to turn the afternoon full sh*thouse.
13. Yet that goal and Haaland’s sane response would mark the beginning and end of City as a coherent contributor to this game. After their game against Liverpool in a few weeks their chance to meaningfully affect the title race will be over. For a team that has won six of the last seven, and the last four in a row, it is a staggering drop-off.
When Arsenal started to really play, City had no response. And by that time they had already played a significant role in their own downfall.
The mistakes playing out from the back that gave Arsenal their early nerve-settler, and Havertz his spurned chance, and Partey his goal to restore Arsenal’s lead seconds after the equaliser were all so, so bad.
It feels like a Rubicon crossed when it is Man City for whom playing out from the back has descended into Utter Woke Nonsense, but the heavy touches from Manuel Akanji and the misplaced pass from Phil Foden were absolute Southampton-level catastrophes.
So inexplicable was Foden’s error in particular – he didn’t even have the excuse of elite Arsenal pressing forcing him into the mistake – that Neville spent five minutes constructing an elaborate narrative in which Partey had somehow managed to conceal himself behind the referee only for pesky footage to reveal it was just a really, really sh*t pass straight to a player Foden could see at all times.
Just go long ffs! Who do you think you are, Man City?
14. The individual errors are just a manifestation of City’s wider malaise, though. A club that has achieved all it has achieved in recent years – and it really is a vast amount – through Pepball’s suffocating, strangling control of games has given way to something far more chaotic.
This was just the latest in a series of alarming unravellings since it all started going wrong in late 2024.
Despite appearances, City were never actually perfect even at their best. They lost games occasionally. But almost all their defeats had some kind of smash-and-grab element to them, a sense of requiring a hugely unlikely confluence of an opponent at their peak, City on an off day, and a fair helping of luck. Arsenal’s 1-0 win against them here last season the perfect example: the Gunners were the better team on the day, but required a late, deflected goal to claim all three points.
Now City lose with regularity, very often deservedly, sometimes heavily and all too often in games where they either never manage to acquire that familiar control or far too easily relinquish it.
The 4-0 defeat to Spurs only looks more and more absurd as 24/25 progresses, but is still something of an outlier. More often City’s disasters have looked like this one with dramatic late collapses.
It’s not a new observation, but there is no getting away from the fact this City side looks old. They were in the end overrun in midfield as their 30-somethings failed to keep going and keep up. Anyone would miss Rodri, and that remains a source of some mitigation, but it’s also extreme negligence that none of City’s busy January activity has rectified the obvious key source of their travails.
15. Even the specifics of a big game running horribly away from them with four goals in the final 35 minutes is familiar. It happened a couple of weeks ago against Paris St-Germain, while they’ve also conceded three in the final 15 minutes to draw against Feyenoord, conceded twice in the final few minutes to lose the Manchester derby and shipped two goals in the final 10 minutes to draw against Brentford.
This is the 11th time in City’s last 13 away games they have conceded two or more goals. They have lost the ability to control a game of football.
And this was not a good time for City’s fragile recovery from the worst depths of their recent form to be so thoroughly disintegrated. This was the start of what is a brutal-looking February for City in which they face plenty more teams who should relish getting at them.
After the (we assume) respite of an FA Cup trip to Leyton Orient, the rest of City’s February reads dauntingly as follows: Real Madrid, Newcastle, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Tottenham. Even Tottenham sitting at the end of that run looks like a cruel joke at Pep Guardiola’s expense given Spurs’ relentless propensity for nonsense of one kind or another against his side.
They remain fourth, but really do find themselves in a grim fight to stay in the Champions League places. To the extent that even the late scoreline-extending Arsenal goals have significance beyond rubbing City’s nose in it. They have lost the goal-difference advantage they enjoyed over their rivals before this weekend, sitting at +13 now, two worse than Chelsea and level with Bournemouth, Newcastle and most absurdly Nottingham Forest, who started the weekend with a goal difference 11 worse than City’s.
16. Arsenal still need more wins like today’s to bring goal-difference into the equation with Liverpool, but they are at least still in the equation with Liverpool.
This was a performance that should give them heart. There is little they can do if Liverpool keep winning, but they have shown that they should now have it in them to keep Liverpool honest.
We still worry about the efficacy and sustainability of the every-game’s-a-cup-final mentality, but that last half-hour really did feel like we were witnessing something. It wasn’t the start of something because Arsenal are far past the start of this journey, but it was a staging post that could mean a great deal. Maybe it won’t even be this season that the true value of this win really becomes apparent.
Because while this is now a four-game unbeaten run for Arsenal against an opponent that used to toy with them, it was the first to leave little doubt about the overall balance of power.
Arteta and Arsenal are now better and stronger than City. And what’s more they know it. Balls to humility.