Mikel Arteta dropped to his haunches, laid his hand on his brow and let his head slump. When he looked up again, he had his thumb and forefinger to his eyes. It was the fifth minute of injury time, Leandro Trossard had just rolled a shot wide and Arsenal’s final chance had vanished. With it, perhaps, so had their hopes of winning the league. At the very least, the gains of Wednesday were handed back.
As it turned out Trossard, who had been Arsenal’s most dangerous forward, may have been a fraction offside anyway, which perhaps would have been the most fitting conclusion. In the previous eight minutes, Mikel Merino had seen a goalbound shot deflected in off Kai Havertz’s hand and hit the inside of a post. There was a sense in those closing stages of the fates, or at least Arsenal’s chronic inability to seize the moment, being against them.
Arsenal, who have played a game more than Liverpool, had cut the gap to four points and now it’s back at six. But it’s not just about the numbers. Liverpool scored twice in injury time to win; Arsenal threw away a 2-0 lead. Liverpool turned a draw into a win as Arsenal turned a win into a draw. It wouldn’t have taken much to have been different for the gap to have been down to two points and for the pressure really to be on Liverpool. As it is, Arsenal are left with very little margin for error.
What will hurt most of all is the sense that, yet again, this was a game they should have won comfortably. Not for the first time in recent weeks, they struggled to turn domination into chances and into goals and then, having got the second 10 minutes after half-time, they were undone by extraordinary sloppiness. The first Villa goal was the result of a fine Lucas Digne cross and Youri Tielemans’ bravery to get his head in front of Merino’s foot. But what felt characteristic was the way Arsenal then subsided.
Tielemans hit the post after Myles Lewis-Skelly had given away possession and then a half-cleared corner was returned to the middle by Matty Cash for an entirely unmarked Ollie Watkins, who had wandered away from Thomas Partey, to score. Arsenal rallied and could have won it late on but eight minutes of nonsense had squandered all the good work they’d done. It will come as no consolation that they’ve had the better xG in 20 of their last 21 games.
Arsenal have been unfortunate with injuries this season. It’s not just that they’ve lost the fifth-most days to injuries, it’s who has been missing. Arsenal have started only 12 of their 33 games this season with both Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard in the side, none of them lost. With both together, their win percentage is 67%; without, it’s 52%. For Gabriel Jesus then to suffer what appears a serious knee injury just as he had started scoring again – albeit mostly against Crystal Palace – feels desperately cruel.
Although the Opta data shows they have actually outscored their xG this season, the sense over the past couple of years has been of Arsenal lacking a vital ruthlessness. They get bogged down against teams who sit deep against them. They often dominate periods of games without taking their chances. They need to play well to win games. A high-class centre-forward would seem an obvious solution, although that has repercussions for the balance of the midfield and the flow of the game. One of football’s great fascinations is its holistic nature: what solves one problem might cause a whole load of other ones.
In the context of the injuries, the summer signings of Riccardo Calafiori and Merino, although they have strengthened the squad, could be seen as having failed to address the most urgent issue. While such criticisms are easy to make with hindsight – no squad is entirely immune when injuries conspire to attack one specific function; just as Tottenham have suffered from losing all three frontline centre-backs – it’s also unrealistic to expect Havertz, a hard-to-define forward-cum-advanced-midfielder, who has only twice in his career got into double figures for league goals in a season, to be a lethal presence in the box. Prowess from set-plays can make up the shortfall to an extent, but only an extent.
But while Arsenal often make heavy weather of scoring, here the bigger problem was at the other end. The absence of William Saliba didn’t help, but the way brains scrambled in the minutes after Tielemans had scored cannot be explained by the absence of one man. Arsenal find it hard to score and if they are conceding too easily that makes it very hard for them to close the gap on a Liverpool side who, this season, have proved masters of getting positive results.
Source: theguardian.com