Arsenal 1-0 Chelsea: Merino’s flick ensures three points
Match report – Player ratings – Arteta reaction – Video
After three games without victory, it was nice to get back to winning ways with a 1-0 defeat of Chelsea yesterday afternoon.
Like many people I’m sure, the league games feel like a bit of a grind now, verging on anti-climactic, but I’m not so far gone that I can’t enjoy beating Chelsea. Was it a great game of football? Far from it, but taking three points from a team as thoroughly unpleasant as that is always worth enjoying, in my opinion.
Mikel Arteta restored Gabriel Martinelli to the starting line-up, with Ethan Nwaneri on the bench, but that aside the team was basically as predicted. I thought we were quite lively to start with, and Chelsea’s main tactic seemed to be just being whining twats. Fernandez fouled Partey off the ball, Marc Cucurella went in just a touch late on Jurrien Timber in an aerial, and Enzo Maresca was bleating about a throw in and where it was being taken from. That was all in the opening seven minutes.
Martinelli forced Sanchez into a save when the Chelsea keeper gave the ball straight to him, and a few minutes later the Brazilian drove into the box, his low cross forced a scramble which they just about cleared. Replays then showed Cucurella clearly leaning into the ball with his arm, then falling over and claiming he was fouled. He wasn’t, and he was lucky not to concede a penalty. You’ve seen them given for a lot less.
Leandro Trossard, who had missed a decent chance in the opening minutes, miscued at the back post from a Timber cross, and Declan Rice shot just wide. On 20 minutes the only goal of the game arrived. Good work again from Martinelli won us a corner, Martin Odegaard clipped the dead ball to the near post, and with Chelsea worrying about the big lads camped in the six-yard area, Mikel Merino flicked a header which went in at the far post.
Chelsea were not happy, so Wesley Fofana decided to stamp on Rice’s hamstring after fouling him. It wasn’t brutal, but it was deliberate. VAR said the incident lacked sufficient force to be considered violent conduct worthy of a red card, but for me that’s something of cop out. I could be crazy, but I feel if you deliberately stamp on any part of an opponent with your metal studs, you should probably be sent off – regardless of the force. But then we’ve seen someone put their studs into the face of an Arsenal player in the past and not suffer any consequences, so what do I know, eh?
Fofana then blunderbussed his way around the pitch for a few minutes, resulting in Pedro Neto getting booked when he said something to the referee. There were some afters between Fernandez and Gabriel, and then after about 35 minutes the momentum of the game swung Chelsea’s way. They put some more effort into doing stuff with the ball than crying and moaning like big blue blubbering bitching babies, and almost got a goal in the process.
David Raya will have been a relieved man when Cucurella’s shot squirted through his hands, between his legs, and beyond the far post. We’ve had some shit to deal with this season folks, we have been tested in many and varied ways, but that would have been up there with the worst things to have happened in this campaign. Conceding a goal to man whose surname sounds like a kind of yeast infection on a dog’s ringpiece would have been too much.
Owner: “Vet, please help Rover, he’s in a lot of distress.”
Vet: “This is the worst case of Cucurella I’ve ever seen. We need to do an arse transplant, stat.”
Fofana landed awkwardly, which was no less than he deserved, and then it was half-time. The second period was niggly, tetchy, and low on quality. Merino came closest to scoring again, a smart back-post volley was well saved by Sanchez, but that was really about it. Chelsea made a load of changes which did nothing to alter the dynamic of the game. They just took off a couple of lads who had been a bit crap, and put on some other lads who were just as crap but in a slightly different way.
We threw on Nwaneri for Martinelli, there were a couple of moments when I think Trossard ought to have done a bit better and which might have seen us make the game safe, but it was stodgy stuff. Cucurella had a tame header which Raya took easily, Timber and Maresca had a little handshake on the sideline, and that – thankfully – was that.
Mikel Arteta said afterwards:
Very happy obviously with the result, with big parts of that performance. I love the attitude of the team from the beginning, the way we approached it, how aggressive we were with our goal. We haven’t conceded almost anything apart from that strange save from David I would say, and that’s a big credit to the team because in my opinion they are the best attacking team in the league.
I’m not necessarily sure I agree with his contention about Chelsea’s attacking prowess, especially on a day when they had injuries to the likes of Nicolas Jackson, Noni Madueke and Cole Palmer, but if it’s a way of bolstering his side’s defensive confidence with big games coming up against Real Madrid (and others), then I’m not going to go too deep into the weeds with that one.
In the end, it was a game of football that happened and that we won, and I don’t think we need to analyse it much further than that. We absolutely needed three points after recent results, and after Nottingham Forest closed the gap with their win on Saturday, and that’s what we got. We can be happy, Chelsea are not, and sometimes that’s all you need. We now have an Interlull to contend with before the final part of the season, and it’s good to go into that on the back of a win.
It just remains for me to wish you all a happy St Patrick’s Day, whack those snakes to the smooth sounds of Barry White – as is the Irish tradition.
So, I’ll leave it there for now. We’ll have Arsecast Extra for you in a little while too. We’ve put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
Pod should be out mid-morning. For now, have a good one.
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