16 Conclusions from Newcastle 1-0 Arsenal: On Arteta, grievances legitimate and contrived, and statement wins

Arsenal’s unbeaten start to the Premier League season is over after a physical, bad-tempered and controversial 1-0 defeat at Newcastle, for whom this is something of a statement win.

1. There’s a lot to get through but let’s start at the end: that’s a huge result for Newcastle at the end of a big week. It’s a week and a result that really confirms where they currently stand, gives them a great chance of ending a trophy drought that would make Spurs blush and puts them right back in the mix at the top of the table.

It was rarely pretty but it was hard earned and built on the sort of rock-solid defensive foundation that carried them so far last season. At times during this campaign, Newcastle have looked unstoppable going forward but rarely have they retained quite the air of defensive domination they had for so long last year.

The attacking verve may have been lacking here, but the defensive resilience was there. Mikel Arteta can rail all he likes against decisions costing his side three points; the reality is that Arsenal created almost nothing from open play and were way below their usual standard with the set-piece chances they did get.

2. A huge part of all that was the performance of Jamaal Lascelles, whose near-flawless performance here in place of Sven Botman is another big tick for Eddie Howe and his ability to find in-house solutions to so many of Newcastle’s biggest problems.

The simple fact is that Newcastle are not now a club that can ask for or expect much sympathy from outside when things go against them, but their injury problems and, ahem, other absences are mounting and they dealt with them admirably here against one of the very best teams in the league.

3. That said, there is no escaping how disappointing a big-game showing this was from Arsenal. They didn’t play badly as such; it’s more that an entire team seemed to pick this day to throw in 6/10 performances. And that won’t get it done at the top of this league no matter what the officials do or don’t do.

Arsenal were – with the conspicuous exception of the game’s only goal – decent enough at the back. Newcastle were not exactly creating chance upon chance and we know how capable they are of that at their very best. But Newcastle still created more than Arsenal, who are in danger of becoming a touch predictable in their attacking play.

While no doubt more solid than last season’s side – Declan Rice an obvious and major part of that in front of the back four – they so far this season lack the verve and vigour of the team that went so close to what would have been a truly extraordinary title win.

They win the ball, they pass it around quite nicely, they get into the final third, they chop inside, they find blind alleys, they lose possession or take low-percentage shots from distance, they come to nothing. Rinse and repeat.

4. This was, in many ways, not dissimilar to Arsenal’s 1-0 win over Manchester City a few weeks ago. A game where two potent attacks having off days were largely nullified by excellent defending eventually settled by a just about deserved goal for the home side that had more than a hint of good fortune about it. Arsenal were quite rightly quick to celebrate the significance of that hard-earned result; they should have no qualms about Newcastle doing likewise.

5. Arsenal had not one single clear sight of Pope’s goal. Their one and only shot on target was a Gabriel Martinelli effort straight at him late in the first half. It would be a stretch to say they have been worked out after a narrow and in many ways unfortunate first loss in their 11th game of the season but there’s definitely something not there now that was there last year.

They are still clearly a very good team and will still be in the conversation at the business end. But they are a good team that other good teams appear to have a better handle on now.

6. The game really hinged not on the goal but on the first-half incident in which Kai Havertz could arguably have seen red but – in our view correctly – did not.

Up to that point, this was a contest between two very good, very organised, very well drilled teams who were largely cancelling each other out by being equally as good as each other.

For a long time after that incident – up to the goal really – it became an extremely rattled contest in which both teams lost their heads, and the referee lost a degree of control. For a good half-hour either side of half-time, the teams cancelled each other out by both being equally rattled. It was barely a football match at points during this spell, more a physical manifestation of an online spat with Bruno Guimaraes as shitposter-in-chief.

7. If we’re willing to accept Kai Havertz’s wildly ill-judged lunge probably did land just on the right side of reckless not dangerous – and in its own way helped his team by rattling Newcastle into collecting three cautions of their own for dissent – we’re far less willing to see things the referee or VAR’s way on Guimaraes’ forearm smash on the back of Jorginho’s head.

This was full head’s gone territory from the Newcastle man and clearly influenced by the Havertz incident. He’d tried and failed to hack Jorginho down moments earlier and then ran after him, stuck his arm out and smacked him.

We don’t know for sure what the VAR argument for not getting involved here was, but the suggestion on Sky Sports that it was because it was deemed to be forearm rather than elbow surely must be wide of the mark. The law on violent conduct makes no such distinction in an instance such as this where there was no attempt to play the ball. He really should have gone.

8. And Guimaraes never really did rediscover the whereabouts of his head for the rest of the game. He booted a ball at Havertz just before half-time. On the hour he barged into the back of Jorginho for seemingly no reason at all beyond his lingering, simmering resentment about something that had happened really quite a long time earlier by this point, and finally in the closing minutes received a long overdue booking for a rugby-style hand-off.

There is much to love about the way Guimaraes plays the game but this was an ugly performance that frequently overstepped the bounds and was poorly handled by the officials. If Arteta has a legitimate grievance about anything that went down here, it was Guimaraes seeing the final whistle.

9. While we’re on the subject, we very much enjoyed the fact “How is Bruno” was trending on whatever Twitter is called now. A testament to both the understandable disbelief among Arsenal fans that he was still on the pitch and the equally understandable variations on the spelling of Guimaraes that followed that jumping-off point.

10. So… the winning goal. We’ll get to the VAR side of things shortly because there really is no avoiding it. But while we understand the primary purpose behind Mikel Arteta’s post-match rant is one of distraction and that its intended audience is Arsenal fans, he also went way too far. No element of that decision was inexplicable. No element of it was a disgrace or embarrassing, to borrow a couple of his choice words.

What we’ll start with is Arsenal’s defending of the goal. Because it was objectively dreadful and worth remembering when VAR is used as convenient cover to explain it all away. Four of Arsenal’s back five were at fault to a greater or lesser extent in the chaotic build-up to the goal, and any one of them avoiding their own mistakes would have left Arsenal not needing to rely on the foibles of VAR to prevent a damaging defeat.

11. First Ben White is caught by surprise and out of position by the initial run of Joelinton. He is then weak in the challenge as the Newcastle midfielder – popping up here wide on the left after a substitution rejig– surges forward. Gabriel, wary of clearing with his right foot, decides to take an extra step and clear the ball with his left. He swings and hits nothing but air. Takehiro Tomiyasu then lets his runner get goalside of him far too easily.

As Joe Willock just about keeps the ball in play (we think), the entire Arsenal defence stops and appeals for a goal-kick. Nobody plays to the whistle.

David Raya, having been outside one post for the initial attack, now inches and shuffles his way across to be outside the other post for the cross back in. We’ve seen this before, of course, and he is once again here stranded underneath a pretty rudimentary cross to the back post, where Gabriel is weak and ponderous again in the challenge with Joelinton who is able to just about squirm the ball into the path of Gordon, who puts a quiet game behind him by scoring a crucial goal to continue his recent good form just minutes after being shifted into the central position when Callum Wilson was withdrawn.

Now these criticisms may seem harsh, but they’re worth remembering. There will be infinitely more focus on the officials in the fallout from this because we all know how this all works. But if Arsenal’s defenders are held to anything like the same standards here as the officials, then they are to be found wanting.

12. And it really isn’t that controversial a decision. Arteta is apparently the only human with a passing interest in football who has never seen one of those videos on the internet of a football in a doorway to show how a ball that appears to be well over the line and out of play can very easily in fact be overhanging it.

Unofficial analysis from beIN Sport would appear to support the view that this ball was just in play when Willock retrieved it. Either way, it was not clearly and conclusively out. Certainly not in the way Arteta imagines it to be with his claim that the review could have been done after studying a single image.

Which brings us to the ‘foul’ on Gabriel. We’ve all Seen Them Given but it’s a bit Not For Me, Clive. There was no disgraceful call either way here, and we would lean in favour of the attacker purely because of the way Gabriel was leaning in to the ball. He put himself in a weak and risky position and paid the price.

Finally, the offside. We reckon Gordon was probably offside. We are not, though, in any way sure of that. We have seen not one image or video or collection of images or videos that proves that in any compelling way.

There is still a reasonable chance he was behind the ball when it was played to him, because the precise moment the ball was played to him and its precise position are so hard to ascertain given the positioning of the players and the pinball ricochet nature of its arrival at Gordon’s feet.

Should there have been better footage available? Arguably. But in the absence of anything compelling, just like with the ball being in or out of play, awarding the goal was a perfectly understandable decision.

It seems strange to credit VAR for staying out of the way when it spent six minutes analysing three different potential infringements, but having found nothing clear or obvious the decision to stay with the original call is the right one. Certainly, it’s what people have said they want.

But as ever with VAR and officiating in general, people want what they want from the system right up until they want the exact opposite.

13. The 10 minutes immediately after the goal summed up both teams’ efforts rather well. In that time, Arsenal completed 55 passes. Newcastle completed one. And yet this utter dominance got Arsenal absolutely nowhere. At no point in that spell, or really ever after the goal, did they look like they might find an equaliser.

And this is a team that made salvaging situations such as this one such a feature of their play last season. It was there even in the 2-2 draw at Chelsea.

But here there was nothing. Arsenal’s attacking efforts really were a damp squib on the one weekend of the year when such a cliché is not just acceptable but pretty much mandatory.

14. It’s not an entirely new phenomenon, though. For a team of their calibre and resources, Arsenal have struggled all season to create chances from open play. They lead the division for both penalties and goals from set-pieces with five and six respectively. This is more observation than criticism, because there’s more than one way to win a football match and Arsenal’s has been mighty effective once again this season.

But today the set-piece threat was also vanishingly insignificant, highlighted perfectly in injury-time when three corners in quick succession were sent harmlessly into the first defender by Leandro Trossard.

“Failing to beat the first man with a corner” is a complaint we’ve never really been on board with. To our mind, it’s a bit like a tennis player hitting a serve into the net. Any competent player could, if they wished, clear the net with every serve they hit. But it wouldn’t mean those were good serves; the idea is to just clear that net to make the opponent’s job that bit more difficult. Same with a corner. We could all hoof the ball over that first defender with no problem. It’s just clearing them that’s the issue.

But hitting three serves into the net in a row is still rubbish, and so was this.

15. We’re not going to start worrying about him too much just yet, but these aren’t great times for Bukayo Saka. The ridiculous workload with which he’s been burdened over the last couple of years appears to be catching up with him as it pretty much had to. He didn’t play badly here – no Arsenal player did, really – but there’s a spark that’s just not quite there at the moment.

We don’t really want to go too far down the ‘protection’ road, but it certainly didn’t help that Dan Burn was able to put in a couple of fairly hefty reducers in quick succession without finding his way into the referee’s notebook.

16. Which brings us to another element of this game that further highlighted a vague feeling of concern we’ve been having all season. The new crackdown on dissent and backchat is a welcome one, albeit one that has been applied wildly inconsistently from game to game and week to week. Eventually, one hopes, a coherent and clear and consistent policy may emerge (Shut up, it might) but until then the best thing is clearly for players just… not to show dissent at decisions.

We get all the arguments for why this is important. We understand why falling numbers of officials at any and all levels doesn’t do the game any good at all.

But at the same time, seeing some pretty crunching tackles go unpunished while three Newcastle players entered the book for disagreeing with a decision seems like it might be a tiny bit arse about face. It’s not either or, of course, but at times here it felt that way.