Labouring

1-0
0-1
2-1
1-0
2-0
2-2
1-1
1-2
1-0
3-2
0-0
4-0
1-1

That is a list of Arsenal’s Premier League results away from home this season. Only Leeds and Burnley have been vanquished with any sense of comfort. It is true that the Premier League has never been more difficult, especially away from home. But I also think it is true that, fundamentally, Arsenal lack the firepower to create separation on the score board.

Here is a list of the XG created in each game since the turn of the year

Bournemouth (a) (0.7)

Liverpool (h) (0.4)

Forest (a) (0.7)

United (h) (0.4)

Leeds (a) (1.4)

Sunderland (h) (1.3)

Brentford (a) (0.3)

This makes every game a highwire act that requires utmost concentration until the last second. While I think Arsenal dominate most of the games they play, they struggle to convert that dominance on the scoresheet. I think that is difficult to sustain over 10 months across four competitions.

Thursday night at Brentford saw Arsenal concede within 10 minutes of scoring. Conceding in the 15-minute spell after Arsenal have scored has become a worrying trend of late. Bournemouth, Inter, Chelsea, Manchester United (x2) and Brighton have also managed it since Christmas.

My theory is that scoring a goal represents such an enormous physical and mental effort, that after the bolder is finally pushed to the top of the hill, there is a sort of lull period. It is a little like when you recover from a spell of intense vomiting and you just let your head drop into the sink for a minute and allow the sweat and snot dangle from your face and nose.

Attacks often look like they are going uphill and scoring from open play is akin to watching the woman you love agonise through labour. There are a lot of factors at play, of course, not all of which are specific to Arsenal. The quality of the league is higher. For all the pearl clutching about the prominence of set-pieces, teams have focused on them because of the prominence of low defensive blocks.

Everyone can play a low block and nearly everyone can do it really well, not least because pretty much every team has the quality to hurt you on the counter, which is a critical part of making a low block effective. I think everyone knows that Arsenal do not have that Salah / Haaland / Henry level of killer in front of goal.

This simply means that Arsenal games come down to finer margins more often and that clearly has a mental and physical toll. It is February and I think the team already look very tired and a part of that is because they cannot make enough games into virtual non-events. That is difficult to sustain across four competitions for 10 months.

In isolation, Brentford, for example, are a really good team and the GTech is a very difficult place to go. Brentford really started the set-piece trend in earnest and they certainly played well enough to get a point- possibly more than that. I also think the physical and mental effort of trying to break them down for 60 minutes proved the undoing of the team.

Momentum will always change when the home team needs to score but the utterly wild swing from Arsenal to Brentford dominance after Madueke’s goal represents more than a typical momentum shift in my opinion. (Andrew covered the data in this morning’s blog post).

We saw a similar plummet in basics after taking the lead against Manchester United recently when the pass success rate went from 85% before Jurrien Timber’s opening goal to 65% immediately afterwards. As well as not having a killer in the penalty area, those players are just not available on the market either- the select band of teams that have them aren’t giving them up.

Robert Lewandowski is 37 and Barcelona are still clinging to him tightly. Harry Kane is 32 and in negotiations for a new contract with Bayern Munich. That is partially because both clubs know they cannot shop for improvements. For all the discussion over Tottenham’s travails over the last two seasons, I think the loss of Kane and Son is the single biggest factor in their decline by miles and miles and miles.

Arsenal sought to bolster their attacking options in the aggregate over the summer. Squad building is a very delicate science- Liverpool went in another direction and added smaller numbers but more expensive quality and it hasn’t really worked for them to this point either.

I do think there is such a thing as too much choice and I always had that nagging anxiety that Arsenal overcorrected a clear issue from last season. If Eberechi Eze cannot play on the left wing, the signing is a waste of time in my opinion and I don’t understand it. With Odegaard, Merino, Nwaneri and Havertz in the squad, Eze is third or fourth choice as a number 10 and doesn’t seem to be in the left-wing reckoning at all.

Arsenal were right to bolster their options and to not overexpose long standing attackers like Saka and Trossard but I also think they added just a little too much and it has created a lack of chemistry. There is a fine line between healthy rotation and too many cooks spoiling the broth and we are very much in the territory of cloudy, slightly sour broth.

At the risk of falling into the ‘player x’s reputation improves exponentially with injury’ trap, I think Havertz is a big miss simply because he is more of a connective tissue for this team. I just don’t think it’s a huge coincidence that when he started against Sunderland and Leeds, Arsenal won 3-0 and 4-0 and as soon as he came out of the lineup at Brentford the attack looked like a collection of strangers again.

The difference in the profile of the attackers is, for my liking, a little too divergent. Diversity can be strength in attack but Eze and Odegaard, for example, just could not be more diametrically opposed as players and the inclusion of one over the other enormously changes how the team has to function.

I sympathise with Arsenal rolling the dice on Gyokeres in the summer. He has scored some goals and has not been a total bust, the striker market has been pretty barren for years now and the club really were in ‘it’s time to shit or get off the pot’ territory. With Jesus and Havertz’s fitness in various states of disrepair, a striker was required for purely numerical reasons too.

However, I think too many games just totally pass him by. Without Havertz floating close by, at Brentford Gyokeres again looked isolated and like he was playing in welly boots. To me, Arsenal’s attack doesn’t really look deep, it looks like a collection of lottery numbers we are hoping assemble in the right order in search of the jackpot. There is little sense of chemistry and that just means the team has to work even harder to score.

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