BANG BANG MAGIC IS SOOOOO BACK
There are often weekends throughout a season you look back on and say, yes, that one was very important to the belief in the project.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can call those weekends pivotal to a big trophy.
This was one of those good-for-the-cause weekends that helped dial up the belief that this season could be ours for the taking.
All of this hype is painfully premature, and we should know better than this. What fan base has been smacked up by Hope in the back alley more times than us? Not many. But we’re gluttons for spankings, masochistic kink lords, we invite the pain because maybe we’re just sick like that.
But… it does feel different, doesn’t it? This batch of hope has a sprinkling of something the usual chalk dust has lacked — realism. We’re not looking at this particular bag of hope and seeing too many impurities. The product is cut with the best defence on the planet, it has a powerful midfield with some stardust, and the forward line has a lot of potential to be quite special.
Arsenal beat Crystal Palace and wrestled another demon from last season to the ground and smothered them with a potato bag. The game wasn’t the most pleasant on the eye, but it had all the trappings of this new Arsenal.
Total control.
Brilliant defending.
Some set-piece mastery.
A little bit of bang-BANG.
Yes, my favourite term on here. We have lacked bang-BANG in games that are tight. One of my complaints from last season was that Arsenal tended to get what they deserve from games. Too many times, we’d actually lose when deserving something. Arteta and Berta tried to change the tide on that front this summer, and the biggest move was Eze. Not really your typical Arteta player. Unpredictable, laissez-faire in style, and a big, big risk taker.
Well, his risk-taking split a game that felt very much like it had the potential to be a disappointing draw. Declan Rice lobbed a ball to Gabriel at the back post, Palace meekly headed into the path of Eze, he beat Wharton to the ball, and karate chopped high and right of the keeper. Filthy stuff. Absolutely disgusting to do that to your old club.
The goal hit different because we don’t normally do things like that. You understand me here? It didn’t feel like we’d earned the goal in the way we normally have to. We’d only had one shot on target up until then. To have someone just say, fuck it, I’m gonna do something a bit mad and it’ll work… felt good. Like progress. The sort of thing Liverpool and City do on the regular. The sort of thing Bergkamp used to do for us. And I really do feel Bergkamp and Eze have a lot of crossover for some reason, even if it’s just the confidence I have that he’ll be there with his magic hat.
It’s actually quite hard writing about Arsenal at the moment. We’re quite drama-less as a team. Crystal Palace had 16 shots against Liverpool and hit the target 11 times. Against Arsenal, they didn’t hit the target until Eddie came on late in the second half. They registered under 0.5 xG. Mateta looked more Akinbiyi than Drogba — and I do think that is quite the achievement because he is unplayable at times. Was it because he was terrible? No. It was because Arsenal are simply outrageous at defending.
I don’t want to pick out individuals, and you know that if I say that, I am certainly going to do that because picking on and picking out are actually my favourite things to do.
BIG GABI. This guy is such a monster. He becomes more Mr Arsenal every single game. There is a lot to be said about feeling loved where you work, and I believe he feels very valued by the club. He has the big contract, he’s playing in a defence that he vibes with. He’s now getting recognition as a world-class player and possibly the best centre-back at Arsenal right now… and he was sensational. Just a gift. Saliba goes off at halftime, Mosquera comes on. No problem. Big Gabi is there. Hincapié comes on for the first time in months, no problem, the big man is there. He’s a leader, he’s a brilliant defender, and he’s one of the most threatening centre-backs from set pieces since John Terry roamed the league.
There were some grumbles to be had, but I’m not going to lose my mind. The context for me is having a very emotional game against Atletico Madrid a few days ago. Hard not to let that impact you physically and emotionally, especially if you’re Spanish. Zubimendi looked a bit rough out there today. Eighty-five percent pass completion against a team we totally controlled is maybe not the standard we expect of a guy who was pushing 90% against Atletico in the week. I guess misplaced passes are fine, but it just felt like the severity of some of his errors today was out of character.
We should talk about the attack overall because it’s come under fire due to the split between set-piece goals and open-play goals. Arsenal have 16 goals this season; a number of teams have one more goal than us, and on the face of it, you’d have to say that’s a lovely number. But 11 of those goals have come from set pieces. That’s 68%. Quite high. Chelsea are the next closest with 52% of their goals coming the same way. Obviously, you have all the rage-bait sites trying to cite how egregious it is to score so many goals from set plays, like we’ve broken a law or something. But that puts us 17th for open-play goals this season, which is quite low.
You could fear that being overly reliant on a type of goal that can be streaky is problematic — we could get sussed at some point. Luck might run out. One of the key players who makes the process tick might get injured. You might also be positive about it and say we’ve just spotted an opening, like the Warriors did with three-pointers, and we’re exploiting it with the best players in the world who can make this part of the game work harder for us.
The bigger worry is open-play goals. That was an issue last summer, and we added players like Eze, Gyökeres, and Noni to the mixer to help there… and so far, it hasn’t really clicked the way we’d have liked for output. We’re underperforming our xG for open-play goals by 2.36, which is really high considering our total open-play xG is 7.36. We’re sixth in the league on the xG number, the real number, 17th.
Room to improve, but again, let’s add some context here.
Our best creator, Martin Ødegaard, has been out all season.
Kai Havertz has been injured all season.
We’re bedding in a new striker.
The whole team has been absorbing eight new players… and doing it while winning.
Asking for perfection on October 26th is silly. Complaining about the types of goals we’re scoring is a bit pathetic in my opinion. If you make set pieces core to your identity and you do well at it, that’s a point of praise, not ridicule. We’re top of the league. Seven clear of Liverpool. Six clear of City. If you are engaging with folk whining about how we score goals, then you are the problem and you need new friends.
It wasn’t a great afternoon for our front three. Saka had been ill all week and put in a very meek performance. Wish Arteta would have played Dowman. Trossard wasn’t at his best. Nor was Eze, if we’re being fair.
Then there’s Gyökeres. Now, I’ll be fair — he’s dropped 1,000 minutes straight without a preseason. He’s in a new league, a new team, and the level is higher.
But we are now at a point where we should be able to have unemotional conversations about the rate of development. That was a really poor game for a Premier League striker. The things that worry me the most are the things I don’t see changing.
His touch is very heavy and it doesn’t put him in good positions.
He lacks speed, so when he’s powering onto a ball, the best he can do is cut back on himself nine times out of ten.
I think it’s a bit of a myth he’s causing defenders nightmares with his heavy running and occupying abilities. He was eaten up by Lacroix and Richards for power, pace, and anything he had to offer the game.
He’s also not getting many shots off against teams he really should be doing better against. Against West Ham, Fulham, and Palace he’s managed 3 shots on target. In September, against City, Newcastle, and Forest he managed 2 shots on target. Liverpool, Leeds, and United, 2 shots on target.
Talk to me about running all day, but that’s table stakes for me, and we’re not talking about a goal glut from the wings as a result of it. We signed ready-made in his peak years. It’s early days, but my hope with a new strikers that blowing duds is they’re ripping a lot off at goal and just getting unlucky. We’re not there right now and it doesn’t look like it’s improving.
The good people of Le Grove and The AOP keep asking me if I’ll hold Kai to the same standards — of course. But we have to be clear, Kai was a converted left eight, not a natural number nine. But if we look at the run at the start of last season with Kai, he scored in four games, racking up four goals and one assist. Gyökeres, over the same period, has scored three Premier League goals in 12 games.
When Kai returns, I’d be surprised if he’s not being given starts, and I am very interested to see what he’s going to bring to a very different attacking unit. If we’re all quite happy with how we play in open play, if we all like the attacking range of passing, then we should all be interested to see how someone like Kai can bring players into the game with better control, brighter creativity, and in my opinion… more speed.
Gyökeres right now feels more like a Sylvain Wiltord signing — and the good news is this: we won the league with Wiltord.
But all of that is nitpicking, and I’d rather do it when we’re winning, because people say you’re scapegoating if you say the same things when you lose a game.
Back to the positive news… Liverpool and City dropped big points against Brentford and Villa.
Arsenal see out block four with two massive games against an in-form Sunderland and a Burnley that are not in form but are well-coached. You’d hope for six points.
Man City’s next two games? Bournemouth (H) and Liverpool (H).
Liverpool’s next two games? Aston Villa (H) and City (A).
Both those sides flirt with the danger zone heading into the November break. If Arsenal can deliver a six-point masterclass, it’s hard to see either of our main rivals taking the full six points in their games.
Arsenal could go into the break nine points clear of both of them.
Now, we can’t be booking hotels for May quite yet, but it gives us a bit of breathing room for the three London derbies after the break against Spurs, Chelsea, and Brentford… followed by the Unai Emery HATES PEDRO Derby that chills me every year.
Either way, you’d rather be Arsenal right now, wouldn’t you?
Yes. Yes, you would.
Ok, that’s me done for today. If you want a little hit of that On The Whistle podcast, get it below. x