Arsenal hang on at Watford, but attack delights

Few other teams can go from cruise speed to clinging on like Arsenal, but their attacking strength was enough to see them past Watford.

Few other Premier League clubs, it would seem, can move from extreme comfort to extreme discomfort in such a short period of time as Arsenal. For much of their trip to Watford they were excellent, smooth and fluid in attack, pressing and dominant in midfield, but by the time they reached stoppage-time at Vicarage Road they were hanging on a little for three points that they should really have had sewn up a good twenty minutes earlier.

Their previous performances had brought three straight wins, but these wins were ground out, rather audacious. Twice against Wolves and against Brentford they won by the odd goal, but the late winner against Wolves – a match which effectively ended any chance their opponents might have had of claiming that Champions League place themselves – felt like it should be transformative. Late, late goals have a tendency to give teams a psychological boost, and the short trip to Watford, a team that still hasn’t taken a single home point since tearing a desperate-looking Manchester United to pieces in November, handed them another three points.

They took the chance, but it wasn’t without its scares. It took just sixteen seconds before Watford had the ball in the net, Emmanuel Dennis finishing from Joao Pedro’s through-ball, only to be called back for offside, but less than five minutes later Martin Odegaard combined nicely with Bukayo Saka before rolling the ball into the corner of the goal to give them the lead.

Odegaard has come to look like a finished article this season, a player around whom Arteta can build a team. Saka, just about the only England player from last summer who hasn’t either been injured or out of form this season, is doing likewise. Who even needs an Aubameyang-esque ‘striker’ when you have players like this, whose movement and intelligence can cut a central defence open with such ease?

But if a familiar pattern looked like it was starting to impose itself upon this match, Watford gave themselves a little hope just six minutes later, when Kiko Femenia found himself with a little space on the right-hand side and clipped the ball back for Cucho Hernandez to throw himself at a scissor kick that squeezed under Aaron Ramdsale to bring them level. It was a wonderful finish, certainly not what you’d expect from a team one place off the bottom of the Premier League, but the lift that it gave Vicarage Road wasn’t quite enough.

Saka was a tormenting, impish presence on the Arsenal right throughout, and after half an hour he proved his inestimable worth to Arsenal again, this time combining with Alexandre Lacazette before steering the ball into the top corner. When Arsenal’s front three play like this, they look like the real deal. Five minutes into the second half, Odegaard and Lacazette combined to set up Gabriel Martinelli to curl the ball into the top corner to increase their lead to 3-1.

But there does remain a slight fragility that Arteta needs to work on. With five minutes to play, a deep cross found Moussa Sissoko at the far post and he steered the ball past Ramsdale to pull Watford back into the game. It made for a more uncomfortable closing few minutes than most would have expected, and Arsenal were left holding on a little bit throughout stoppage-time. But they got there in the end.

And that is what really counts, at this point of the season. There’s a race on for fourth place in the Premier League, and Arsenal look like the only team still in it who seem to want to be in it, at times. Manchester United still seem to be a deeply unhappy club. Spurs don’t even seem to know whether they’re actually any good or not. West Ham United may have tripped up once or twice too many times to be able to launch a challenge for fourth place now. Arsenal haven’t been winning matches by the margins that they might have hoped to have done, but they are winning, and that’s more than their rivals seem capable of, at the moment.

But all of this does hint at promise. There’s more than the kernel of a really strong team in there, and they’ve put themselves in pole position to claim a return to the Champions League for the first time in six years with this result. If they can iron out this tendency to make wins slightly more difficult than they need to be, they may even now start to look at Chelsea in third place in the table and wonder whether there might even be a chance of overhauling them. But one step at a time. Arsenal are winning consistently, and they’ve picked the perfect time of year to start doing so.