“We started extremely well, dominated the game, dominated the pitch, scored two goals. And after that we made a huge mistake...”
Arsenal’s mistake, Mikel Arteta explained, was to have “stopped playing with the same purpose to score the third and the fourth one”. Nobody was disputing that analysis, but surely, one reporter suggested, the collapse from 2-0 up to 2-2 was a reflection of the pressure Arsenal are under at this point in the title race.
“I would say yes if I see a team from the beginning playing..” – and at this point Arteta mimed choking – “but when I see a team playing with that flow, no. At 2-0 certainly it’s not the pressure. It is that we really misunderstood what the game required in that moment.”
[ Arteta bemoans lack of killer instinct as Arsenal drop two crucial pointsOpens in new window ]
But the truth was that his team hadn’t misunderstood anything. If anything, they had understood the situation all too well. They understood that they had worked their way into a winning position, and that they still had 80 minutes left to play. They understood that in this 80 minutes they had nothing more to gain and everything to lose.
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When you have something to lose you naturally start to think about how you can protect it. A team in Arsenal’s position, 2-0 up after 10 minutes, knows “only mistakes can cost us the game now”. Consciously or subconsciously, the priority becomes to avoid mistakes. And so Arsenal, instead of finishing off West Ham – a mediocre side that were slaughtered 5-1 by Newcastle in their last home game – throttled back and started to play keep-ball, as though aiming to nullify the rest of the game through possession.
The containment plan was going okay right up to the moment when one of Arteta’s strongest and most dependable players, Thomas Partey, got caught in possession just outside his own box by Declan Rice. Rice’s aggression in that challenge felt like a response to Arsenal’s lack of aggression.
It’s worth noting that Rice seldom tries to win the ball that high up the pitch. He’s in the bottom 2 per cent of top-five league midfielders for tackles in the final third, his job at West Ham is to screen his own defence. But Rice had sensed that Arsenal had lost interest in attacking, in which case he might as well go forward and attack them.
The result would have been shattering enough for Arsenal as a one-off, but this was the second game in a row they had drawn after leading 2-0. Arteta’s analysis of last week’s 2-2 draw at Liverpool had mentioned “this special atmosphere and stadium”. Lost amid the talk about the Anfield factor was a reckoning with the mistakes that had been made by Arsenal – including their coach.
Granit Xhaka was widely criticised for spurring Liverpool into a response with a needless off-the-ball provocation of Trent Alexander-Arnold. But Arteta’s decisions in the second half – particularly the replacement of his captain and main creator Martin Ødegaard with the young centre half Jakub Kiwior – invited more Liverpool pressure while reducing Arsenal’s threat on the counter. Hoping to protect the lead, the manager adopted a defensive crouch. When the team did the same thing at West Ham yesterday he called it a mistake, but they were only following his example.
Bukayo Saka’s penalty could be seen as part of the same struggle with psychological pressure, but as Arteta pointed out, everyone who takes penalties ends up missing a few penalties. A more worrying moment came a few minutes later, when Saka broke forward as part of a three-on-two Arsenal counter-attack. When Saka is at his best this situation is a near-certain goal. This time he acted as though he couldn’t see his team-mates, cut inside and shot weakly at the goalkeeper.
The immense exhaustion he projected in that moment reminded you that this is a player who has already been involved in 49 matches for club and country since August. His ability is so phenomenal that neither Arteta nor Gareth Southgate feel they can leave him out – but the workload is too much for a 21-year old.
Of the 23 outfield players to have played more Premier League minutes this season than Saka, only Declan Rice and Marc Guehi are under 25, and they play in less explosive positions, further back in the field. The only attacking players of Saka’s age who have played comparable league minutes are Brennan Johnson of Nottingham Forest and Saka’s team-mate on Arsenal’s other wing, Gabriel Martinelli.
Exhaustion might emerge as a decisive factor in the closing weeks of the season. No Manchester City attacker has played as much football as either Saka or Martinelli, which would be an ominous indicator for Arsenal, even if City’s form was not ominous enough by itself. In recent weeks Guardiola’s team have found a gear they never quite managed to engage during the first half of the season: 10 consecutive wins, 37 scored, four conceded.
The turning point – not that anyone noticed at the time – might have been their 1-0 win at Chelsea in January. That was the night Guardiola first unveiled the 3-2-4-1 shape that has become familiar in the last few weeks.
It wasn’t a dazzling debut for the system. João Cancelo played in an unfamiliar role on the right of midfield, and was substituted at half-time after an ineffective performance. He was furious. Within a couple of weeks he had fallen out with Guardiola and had been sent on loan to Bayern.
The breakdown of the relationship between the coach and a player who had been so important in the title wins of the previous two seasons seemed a bad sign. It has turned out to be a kind of creative destruction, with Cancelo’s departure making room for others to flourish.
The signature move of Jack Grealish’s first season at City was to get the ball on the left, pretend he was about to try something, then pass it back to Cancelo. The new system has let him take on more responsibility. Grealish came on in that Chelsea game to play the match-winning assist for Riyad Mahrez. His form post-Cancelo has been consistently brilliant.
The Premier League could do with Arsenal holding on at the top, rather than see City – the team they have accused of systematically breaking financial rules – win a fifth title in six seasons, with all the questions that will imply about the health of the competition.
But now that Guardiola has found a system which gives him the control he prioritises while also allowing Erling Haaland to wreak his havoc up front, City look Europe’s outstanding team by far. Watching them destroy Bayern last week, it appeared the Treble is not just realistic – it’s likely.
