Wolves 2-2 Arsenal: Panic stations

Match report – Player ratings – Arteta reaction – Video

Warning: I went to bed after midnight feeling quite annoyed. I struggled to sleep, and woke up at 5am (hence the early blog), feeling more annoyed. That might be reflected in the tone of my writing today.

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Well, that was fucking terrible. There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened against Wolves last night. We were 2-0 up against the team that prop up the Premier League, and ended up losing 2-2. I know, it’s a draw, but it feels like losing.

And it was a game that couldn’t really have started any better. An early goal always helps settle the nerves, and that’s exactly what we got when Declan Rice produced a good cross and Bukayo Saka stooped to head home from close range. 1-0 after 5 minutes, and that’s just what the doctor ordered.

After that, Arsenal more or less controlled the first half, but it was very much what Arsene Wenger used to call ‘sterile domination’. Lots of possession, almost no cutting edge, and barely any attacking threat. Saka in midfield was an interesting call, and I can’t be a revisionist this morning and complain about it because it was something I was curious to see, but it feel like the midfield in general was a collection of individual parts rather than one unit.

Rice didn’t look right to me, despite having the midweek off, and generally speaking I wonder if you need both he and Martin Zubimendi in the team for games like this. They’ve both been very good this season, but against a team like Wolves, who sat deep after we scored, you need a bit more craft in my opinion.

I don’t think we helped ourselves with that front three either. Gabriel Martinelli and Noni Madueke either side of Viktor Gyokeres just doesn’t work. They go together like toothpaste and orange juice. I have some vague sympathy in that options there are limited, and as we saw later it’s not as if Gabriel Jesus is miles better than the big Swede, but as a combination it doesn’t work, and centre-forward remains a considerable issue for me. That trio feels like shooting yourself in the foot, then the other foot, then picking up your toes and putting them in a blender to mince what’s left into a fine paste.

As the first half came to a close, I grew uneasy. We let Wolves back in the game a bit. It wasn’t as if they were having a load of shots, but you could hear the crowd get encouraged by what they saw, and that must have applied to the team as well. Still, half-time was a chance to regroup, come out, and do better. I don’t know what the manager said at half-time, but think Any Given Sunday, and then the opposite.

Nevertheless, we scored again. It was pretty much against the run of play as Wolves had had nearly 60% possession before Gabriel’s pass found the run of Piero Hincapie who took it on and finished well. The flag went up, VAR checked and saw he was onside, and it was 2-0 to Arsenal. A position from which any team with title credentials has to go on and win.

Arsenal: “Hold my beer.”

Not for the first time this season, we conceded very soon after scoring. Hugo Bueno’s finish was very good, but I think Hincapie could close him down sooner, and as good as David Raya has been, I can’t help but think when goals like that go in there’s a reason the very best goalkeepers have at least a 3-4 inch height difference on him. Maybe that’s nit-picking, because there was more to come from the Spaniard, but it’s not the first time that has occurred to me during his time here.

But look, some ups and downs are to be expected in this league. It’s how you respond that counts, and Arsenal just looked scared. I don’t think that’s a criticism you’ve ever really been able to level at this iteration of Arteta’s team, but it’s hard to escape that conclusion this morning. We were rattled by conceding, and more afraid of letting another one in than scoring again. Eberechi Eze and Gabriel Jesus came on for Madueke and Gyokeres, ostensibly to give us a bit more technical control, but that didn’t happen.

The longer it went on, the worse we got. I don’t know how Ben White didn’t come on for Jurrien Timber whose decision making, perhaps due to accumulated fatigue over the course of the season, got worse and worse. He clumped the ball to nowhere more than once, and ahead of him Martinelli couldn’t run, usually the most reliable part of his game. Leandro Trossard came on then had to go off after a nasty, deliberate shoulder to the head from a player already on a yellow card. Riccardo Calafiori came on for the 6 minutes of injury time.

Jesus had a chance to score or square for Martinelli, but a lack of conviction saw that snuffed out. Less than 30 seconds later Wolves got their second. It was a hopeful cross into the box that Gabriel could have headed away, but Raya came for it when he didn’t need to and fumbled the ball back into the area. From there a young man called Tom Edozie, making his Premier League debut (of course he was), fired a shot at goal which Calafiori almost blocked away but saw it rebound off the post and in. 2-2.

What a fucking mess. If Raya is going to come there, he has to take the ball. Typically he’s a decisive keeper, more than once that kind of approach has helped bring some calm in games, but this time he made an absolute bollocks of it. It was a goal borne of a low level panic that was evident in the way we played that second half. The pressure and stress of the title race? Almost certainly, but I think you have to seriously question why you’re feeling that way against Wolves.

With all due respect to them – and they deserve some because they didn’t roll over and kept plugging away even at 2-0 down when they could easily have called it quits – they’ve lost 18 of their 27 games this season. I always say you can take nothing for granted in the Premier League, yesterday was an example of that, but this was a mess entirely of our own making. Not to mention, yet another late goal conceded.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my nervousness this season, about how it isn’t just about how high the stakes are, but things I’ve seen from this team that make me uneasy. This is maybe the 6th or 7th time (perhaps more) we’ve conceded in the dying stages of games. It hasn’t always cost us, but it’s a very, very bad trait to have developed, and last night we paid the price for a second half where we let our nerves get on top of us. This famed control that was so prevalent in the early part of the season has deserted us, and the only real explanation is an intangible.

We’re up to 99 on the shittingourselves-o-meter.

As for Jesus getting involved with Mosquera at the final whistle, maybe there’s more to it than we know, but it looked performative and perhaps if he applied that level of commitment to when he has the ball we might be better off. It’s not to single him out, per se, but as a representation of how this team reacted to adversity, it wasn’t good. It smacked off ‘Arsenal are losing their composure’, and that can only be a fillip for the other title contenders.

Afterwards, Mikel Arteta said:

Extremely disappointed, obviously, with the result, with the way the game ended, but we have to blame ourselves. I think the performance in the second half didn’t show anything close to the standards that are required in this league to win, with the margin that I think should have existed today, especially in the manner that we played the first half. It’s a moment of disappointment.

We all want to talk a lot about how we’re feeling, but it’s not the moment to do that, because anything that we do has to always and only be with the intention to help the team. Right now I think we have to swallow that frustration. When you are at this level and at the top, you need to take the hit, because today we deserve them as well, and move on as quickly as possible, because on Sunday we have a big game coming up.

I watched his interview on Sky afterwards, and I can’t really remember him looking that shaken before. Perhaps in the early stages of his tenure, but then that was more easily understood because he was trying to build something and the blocks he had weren’t always of the highest quality. Now, we’ve spent a fortune, he’s got the biggest, deepest squad of any team in the Premier League, and we’ve made a right mess of a game which really should have been a routine win.

Perhaps what’s most stark this morning is that, while it’s obviously a gut punch because of the circumstances of the late equaliser, is that it doesn’t feel that shocking. The way we’ve played of late, and in truth for significant chunks of this Premier League season, leaves you open to this kind of thing. Below, a WhatsApp I sent to James as the game headed towards the final stages.

You might argue that’s an example of the classic fatalistic football fan fearing the worst, but I swear I felt it coming in a very real way. We brought it on ourselves, we took our prosthetic feet which replaced the ones we shot ourselves in in the first half with that team selection, strapped them to a case of Roadrunner/Coyote style TNT, and lit the fuse. Then dropped a fucking anvil on our heads for good measure. Diabolical.

Plain and simple, this was a mess, and this season is now on something of a knife-edge. This is either a moment where you hit a kind of rock bottom, consolidate, and react in a positive way; or it’s one you point to in a few months time and say ‘That’s the point when it went off the rails’. It’s now incumbent on the manager to get things working again, because there’s something wrong and it’s his job to fix it. There’s no hiding place for Mikel Arteta this season, and certainly not when it looks like you’re about to perform a slow motion stumble off a tall building.

We were in brilliant shape in the Premier League, but just two wins from the last seven means our title credentials have been undermined by poor performances and questionable tactics and team selections. There is, obviously, the ability to recover, do better, improve, and produce results, but the clock is ticking and there’s a pivotal game on Sunday. I have no doubt this team wants to win the league, but they have to start showing it on the pitch again before it’s too late.

They need to wake the fuck up, and step it up the fuck up, before they completely fuck it up completely.

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Thanks for being with me if you got this far. We will have a podcast for you a bit later on, and I suspect that could be a sweary one too. Stand by for that, in the meantime, try and enjoy your Thursday.

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