Arsenal and Manchester City both miss chance to make Premier League title statement

This game was never going to win or lose a title race. We’re five games in and we’re all going to pass a lot of water before the end of the season comes. But it does give us an idea of how things currently look like shaking out over the coming weeks and months.

First, for Arsenal, late rescuers of what will feel to them like a very good point thanks to Gabriel Martinelli’s late equaliser.

It honestly felt like it was not going to come. Arsenal once again started out in conservative mode, and until the 92nd minute it looked like that was going to end up costing them. Again.

Mikel Arteta has watched Arne Slot’s Liverpool win the league last season by playing incisive, direct, quick-attacking football. Guardiola ran into major problems last season for many of the same reasons Arsenal have underwhelmed, and has set about fixing them by borrowing some of Slot’s principles. Yet Arteta has seemingly decided ‘nah, that’s not for us, thanks’.

There is, in all fairness, data to suggest that Arsenal have taken a more direct approach this season, but that seemingly does not apply to the big games. They beat Manchester United at Old Trafford courtesy of Altay Bayindir’s goalkeeping error, but were hugely unambitious in their approach and made little to no attempt to kill that game off. Their desire to focus on keeping things tight against Liverpool ended in a 1-0 loss thanks to Dominik Szoboszlai’s wonder-strike.

At the very elite level, football is often about fine margins. It’s not as though Arsenal are suddenly getting battered left, right and centre; we are talking about winning or losing by a single goal. In the second half in particular here, they dominated the territory and made City work. But teams now know far better than they did two years ago how to defend the constant rondo.

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It feels like Arteta’s reluctance to respond to prevailing tactical trends and developments over the past year has overall shifted the margins against Arsenal. More than feels like, in fact; the numbers prove it.

True, the Gunners ran riot against City in this fixture last season, claiming a 5-1 win in February; but that is one of just three games Arsenal have won in their 10 meetings with last season’s top five since the beginning of last season (W3 D4 L2), and the only one of those three wins that came by more than a single goal.

Arsenal’s run rate of 1.4 points per game from those fixtures is still decent, but a significant enough drop from the 1.8 points per game they took against the same opponents in the previous two seasons (W8 D5 L3, with five of those wins coming by two goals or more).

That’s an extra three or four points per season that Arsenal are failing to get from their rivals – and you can add to that when you consider those points are of course being picked up by those opponents: their rivals have gone from 0.88 per game against Arsenal in 2022/23-2023/24, to 1.1 since the beginning of last season. The numbers are still in Arsenal’s favour, but receding, and giving up five or six points is a gulf in title races that Arsenal were already consistently losing.

Their summer acquisition of Viktor Gyokeres and Eberechi Eze should have removed their age-old excuse that they just don’t have the personnel to do it. They did not create a single chance for their new striker, while Eze was only introduced at the break, kept out of the side by the steady-away-but-unspectacular Mikel Merino.

Is there a lesson for Arteta, then, that when the goal actually came, it had nothing to do with relentless pressure and trying to grind the opposition down through sheer attrition, but rather a straight ball over the top from – of course – Eze that caught City playing a ridiculously high defensive line for a side trying to see out a 1-0 win?

For City, that served as a chastening reminder that their old bad habits that saw them recede so badly last season.

It had looked for all the world like being a professional victory claimed thanks to the kind of brilliantly incisive fast-paced attack that is increasingly becoming City’s hallmark, and on which Erling Haaland is absolutely thriving. If he had not been quite so wasteful with a similar second half chance, City might have been out of sight long before the end of the game.

But that injury time concession came from virtually the only time Guardiola’s side broke from their plan and left Gianluigi Donnarumma exposed to a one-v-one – the goalkeeper not helping his cause by haring out into no-man’s land and telling Martinelli exactly how to find the net.

There is a similar lesson for Guardiola here. City had controlled the game even without the ball in the first half, but gave up all ambition of killing the game off after Haaland’s second chance went begging. Clearly, they are still not entirely back to their confident, dominating selves yet.

Arsenal will be happier with the draw, in the circumstances, but neither side has made a statement other than to reiterate the flaws we already knew they had. With Liverpool also looking much more vulnerable than they were last season and Chelsea continuing to be wildly inconsistent, that could either be a very good point for them both – or a big wasted opportunity.