16 Conclusions on Arsenal 1-1 Man City: Liverpool win as Arteta plays safe and Pep goes Full Mourinho
Hands up who thought they’d live to see Pep Guardiola go Full Mourinho? It wasn’t even low-block-and-counter by the end at the Emirates. It was low-block-and-block. And it nearly worked.
Hard to shake the idea that however relieved Arsenal might be with that exquisite late equaliser, the real winners of this one are a couple of hundred miles to the north-west.
1. This is precisely what Arsenal fans were worried about when the fixture list came out in the summer. To be entirely clear from the very beginning, the dark murmurings that this formed some part of The Conspiracy were always bunk.
But the concern was real and not without merit: that Arsenal could with only a couple of very minor errors find their title challenge in fairly deep early trouble.
And here we are. One narrow defeat to a late worldie at Anfield and one slightly curious home draw with Man City later, and before September is out Arsenal find themselves five points adrift of the champions and playing catch-up against a team yet to drop a single point.
Spread these fixtures out more evenly across a season, and 10 points from five games against United (away), Leeds, Liverpool (away), Forest and City would feel broadly fine. Arsenal must now convince themselves that remains the case.
2. Gary Neville came straight in with the inevitable ‘Liverpool the winners’ conclusion after this game ended all-square, and the trite glibness of the observation shouldn’t deflect from the apparent accuracy. Or stop us from making the same conclusion ourselves. The lateness of Arsenal’s equaliser after an afternoon of intense frustration means they perhaps in the end leave the Emirates happier with the point than City, who sacrificed everything up to and including their entire identity in an attempt to cling on to a win that would have meant so much.
But any result here other than an Arsenal win was always one whose biggest positive impact would potentially be felt a couple of hundred miles away at Anfield.
Today’s results here and elsewhere leave Liverpool as the only team left with a 100 per cent home record even at this early stage. It highlights the unpredictability and vulnerability absolutely everyone else has displayed in the first 50 games of this Premier League season, and does leave everyone else with plenty to worry about.
If Liverpool can ease clear like this in their current form, what happens if and when they stop dozing off the second they take a 2-0 lead? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
It does feel like both these teams missed an opportunity here.
3. While acknowledging that different game styles appeal to different people – one man’s riotously entertaining goalfest is another man’s unacceptable defensive disasterclass, after all – we’re still going to stick our neck out and say we’ve seen some far more entertaining games between these two in recent seasons.
But this was one that crackled with tension throughout. A lot of that tension seemed to come from the stands. Not for the first time, we find ourselves wondering whether the Emirates is a particularly fun place to play these big games.
There’s a suffocating angst about proceedings in any game like this that ends up being close, which by definition is quite a lot of them. The frustration at misplaced passes, the frequent urging – particularly notable today with a particularly vocal exponent apparently sat pretty close to Gary Neville – for Arsenal to play the ball forward and take the game to City far more than they were doing.
Bubbling fan frustrations are not unique to Arsenal or the Emirates, of course, but there’s an oppressive, deadening feel to it on days like this.
It’s a big part of why the Celebration Police are always so interested in goings on here, of course. Arsenal’s series of second-place finishes have heightened the sense that every game, every goal, every refereeing decision is of gargantuan importance to the whole narrative, and is treated as such.
We’re not having a go, it just seems exhausting.
4. One thing that is for sure is that had City held on for victory here and received so much as a paragraph of praise when Pep Guardiola spent the bulk of the second half in a truly shocking to witness low-block-and-counter tribute to Jose Mourinho, then Arsenal heads would have been on Mars given the criticism their own near sarcastically cautious big-game approach continues to attract and will again today.
5. It seems reasonable to say Mikel Arteta got it wrong here with his initial team selection, and that he can receive only partial credit for correcting course at half-time. Taking this very first opportunity to prefer the meat-and-potatoes stylings of Mikel Merino and Leandro Trossard over Ebere Eze in a big game felt like something that was, if anything for me, Clive, just a little bit too Arteta.
Eze could and should have started in place of one of those two, and Arsenal would have been a better side for it. As the second half showed. Eze wasn’t flawless by any stretch, most memorably when nearly smashing the ball off Declan Rice into his own net for some reason after Haaland spurned a rare second-half chance for City to put the game to bed, but the fact it was his raking high-tariff pass from deep that finally cracked open Pep Guardiola’s Blue Wall deep into injury time should not be lost on anyone.
Sometimes picking the safest option is in its own way the biggest gamble of all.
6. Although Arteta’s conservative, safety-first approach might have looked less glaringly misplaced here had his usually reliable defence not imploded so spectacularly in the worst possible way against the worst possible opponent.
Arsenal had made a promising if not particularly penetrative start, dominating possession and territory. It turned out they were just playing directly into the hands of this new-look, bizarro-world iteration of Man City where up is down, left is right, and Erling Haaland is… well Erling Haaland is still a world-class goalscorer.
That early goal shifted the whole dynamic of everything that would follow, and was a sucker-punch in which Arsenal were caught with too many defenders way too far upfield when a turnover allowed City to break.
7. It’s the type of goal we used to see Haaland score all the time for Borussia Dortmund, but one that until this season wasn’t so frequently seen for a City side who dominate possession and territory and crush opposition into eventual submission rather than springing unexpected counter-attacks on possession-dominating opponents who have been lured into a trap.
He’s still lethally good at these chances, it turns out, despite until this season falling slightly out of practice.
8. Mistakes were made by Arsenal, though. Gabriel was probably doomed from the outset by the starting positions, but if we’re greedy we’d have liked to see something more approaching a sprint back to at least put some doubt into what was about to unfold.
But to our mind the conspicuous error was William Saliba’s. He was left in an invidious position of being solely responsible for managing the threat posed by two onrushing attackers, yet surely still chose the less prudent of two unappealing options.
9. Saliba’s first job here is surely to ensure the passing lane to Haaland was not so readily available. If Tijjani Reijnders goes on and scores himself, then fair play to him. It’s about playing the percentages. What was more likely to lead to a goal here? A solo run from Reijnders, or a passer of his talent playing a relatively simple ball to provide the world’s most lethal finisher with a relatively simple chance?
It might seem harsh, and the instinct to prioritise the man in possession in these impossible situations understandable, but Arsenal are a team with elite ambitions whose approach so often lends outsized importance to one or two moments in one or two games.
We hesitate to make this about Liverpool yet again, but these are the sort of situations Virgil van Dijk is so good at weighing up when deciding who, if anyone, might be permitted to get a shot away when he’s placed in a difficult spot.
10. Arsenal-assisted it may have been, but City played their brilliantly, flying into action with such speed and precision before building to what felt like an inevitable conclusion long before Haaland applied the actual finishing touch.
We’re still not at all convinced that this counter-attacking version of City is going to be anything like as effective as the title-hoovering death-by-possession sides, but it appears reasonable to suggest it might be more enjoyable for Haaland.
11. And also Jeremy Doku. We thought it after the derby last weekend, and the idea only solidifies further after today that he has become the player City signed Jack Grealish to be, and one whose licence to roam and rove on those counter-attacks makes him City’s one designated maverick.
He was excellent again today, despite ending up as literally City’s only viable means of progressing upfield at all before he too was sacrificed on the altar of all-out defensive sufferball.
12. As Arteta knows to his cost, if you take the defensive, conservative approach to game-management you are placing yourself at the mercy of the outcome. It sounds obvious, but there often is a bigger-picture element to things that supersedes one result no matter how significant. Yet result bias is real and all-pervasive.
Had Guardiola’s plan worked here he would have been praised for displaying arch-pragmatism in delivering the desired outcome. Instead he must now accept criticism for retreating so fully into defensive mode and allowing Arsenal to control the game to such an outlandish degree
Of course, both the praise and now the criticism will be over the top. We can’t imagine it was Guardiola’s idea having switched to a back-foot 5-4-1 ‘protect what we have’ formation midway through the second half for said back five to then adopt an unnecessarily high line when what they had was still there to be protected deep into injury time.
Even Gianluigi Donnarumma, a keeper so thoroughly at home in this kind of environment and seemingly once again minutes away from proving a significant thorn in Arsenal’s side, was way further from his goalline than appeared either necessary or prudent in the circumstances.
It was the one real mistake City made when attempting to see the game out and it cost them dearly, but it shouldn’t entirely negate the efficacy of the plan for the preceding 25 minutes in which City and Guardiola appeared to be actively mocking Arsenal’s renowned set-piece prowess by facing, and calmly dealing with, as many of them as they could possibly allow.
13. And yet criticism there must still be. Because we really aren’t sure that Arsenal’s own proactive half-time changes were anything like enough to force Guardiola’s hand the way they did. We really aren’t sure what was so wrong with the first-half gameplan, or even that of those first 20-odd minutes of the second half when Arsenal were on top but hardly hammering the door down and City remained a live threat on the break.
It was still a novel approach for a Guardiola City team, but that first half felt far more like a team controlling the game without worrying about controlling too much of the ball. The shape and flow of the game felt like it was all working to City’s plan, one where Arsenal could be held at arm’s length comfortably enough despite the odd flash of brilliance from Noni Madueke, and the extent of City’s latent threat on the break always at the back of Arsenal’s mind.
City allowed Arsenal to control the game far more in that second half and, while it still didn’t result in a flurry of shots on Donnarumma’s goal or the loss of that breakaway threat – at least not initially – it just felt like an unnecessary over-reaction and adjustment to a game that from the outside appeared to be working out pretty well for City.
14. And even if we could just about stomach the initiative-ceding switch to that back five, the removal of Haaland with 15 minutes to go, and Doku 10 minutes after that, felt harder to justify.
The Haaland withdrawal was surely a double victory for silliness, robbing City as it did of a man who has proved himself a very capable defender at set-pieces – something of obvious tangible value here – as well as providing the one outlet that might allow City to get the ball up the field and more importantly keep it there for more than a few seconds at a time.
15. That the game ended with a City side comprising Savinho and a load of centre-backs and centre-midfielders trying to chase a late winner took things to the brink of farce. That they actually created enough set-piece moments of their own in those closing minutes to provoke Arteta into a defensive change of his own, replacing Martin Zubimendi with Cristhian Mosquera for some final-seconds defending, gave a curious game in which both teams seemed to be as intent on second-guessing the other as doing their own thing an amusing coda.
16. But the battle of reactive substitutions had already by then been won by Arteta, who responded to the removal of Haaland and with it the significant prospect of a second City goal by replacing Jurrien Timber with Gabriel Martinelli.
He can be a frustrating figure at times, but he’s fond of the spectacular and his equaliser was certainly that.
He had significant help. From Eze, whose pass was perfect, to the City defence whose inexplicable high-line gave him the space in which to operate, and the previously immovable object that was Donnarumma, who on this occasion hared into no-man’s land and thus showed Martinelli the way to defeat him.
But being shown the finish that was required, and even recognising the finish that was required are still a long way from actually delivering the finish that was required when it was one so difficult at such a desperate time of such a vital game.
Yes, Liverpool feel like the winners right now and that’s because they probably are. But they’re clearly not perfect. The same is true of these two as well – especially Arsenal, but especially City. There’s still every chance for this goal to mean everything for Arsenal in the end. Because there really is still an awful long way to go.
