Morning all.
Things get quiet after a win, especially as we go into an Interlull, but I don’t think the victory over Man City should fade as quickly as some other games. This was a long-time coming after all, and it’s incumbent on us to enjoy it, bask in it, for as long as we feel like.
Beyond the Arsecast Extra, you can check out Lewis’ new tactics column which looks at how Mikel Arteta set up his team for this game, and some of the tweaks he made during it. In yesterday’s blog there was a lot about what this win would mean for the team itself, the belief the players can take from it, but I think there’s something specific about the manager here too.
He has beaten Pep Guardiola before. The FA Cup semi-final in 2020, the Community Shield this season, but the inability to get the better of him in the Premier League has, I’m sure, been like an itch he couldn’t scratch. The single most important thing is the fact Arsenal took three points from the best team in the world, but for Arteta this will have gone a bit deeper than that given his relationship with Guardiola and that club. At the very least it might see a fall-off in the questions about what he expects from Pep before every single game, as if they haven’t been asked a hundred times before.
He is a very passionate guy, as we can all see during every game, but there was something a bit extra about his reaction to the Martinelli goal. It was the like the converse to that late Rodri goal back in January 2022, the gut punch of that moment replaced by the high of Martinelli’s shot hitting the back of the net. And, as the tactics column shows, this was a consequence of how Arteta set Arsenal up. Sometimes that moment doesn’t come, you take the point and think ‘Ok, we’ve stopped losing to them, let’s do better next time’, but this is much better.
For those of you into the stats/numbers side of things, Jon Ollington has Arsenal 1-0 Man City – By the numbers over on Arseblog News. Lots to unpack, but I particularly enjoyed this about William Saliba:
He won 100% of his duels and completed 97% of his 70 attempted passes against Man City. The Frenchman didn’t commit a single foul, nor did he get dribbled past once.
It was an outstanding performance, and I think the passing stat in particular demonstrates the coolness of this young man. City are one of the most difficult teams to play against, and in the second half in particular we saw them press higher than in the first, but that’s no bother to Big Willy. He’ll just pass it around you. The way he and Gabriel dealt so well with both Haaland and Alvarez was a joy to watch. So often the stuff people love to see in football is the flair, the attacking, the skillz etc, and I get that, but as a former centre-half myself, I take a lot of joy from seeing great defenders and great defending. We got that from both of them on Sunday.
Saliba is, by the way, out of France’s squad for the Interlull due to a reported toe injury. Hopefully nothing too serious. Meanwhile, Bukayo Saka is out of England’s games too, which is good for us/him. However, he was required to report for duty so the England medical team could assess him. Maybe this is part of the protocols, but I can’t really remember this ever being applied to another player. If he wasn’t fit to start for Arsenal – where he always starts if he’s fit – that should have been good enough for Gareth Southgate.
I understand the desire to have a player as good as Saka available for the qualifier against Italy, but I don’t really think there was any need to go through this kind of rigmarole. Hopefully the two weeks off can be really useful for him, just to recover, get treatment on that hamstring strain, and then be ready to go when we need him in a couple of weeks time against Chelsea.
Right, that’s it for this morning. Join us over on Patreon a little later for a new episode of The 30, recapping the weekend’s Premier League action.
More here tomorrow!
