Arsenal 2-1 Chelsea: Points more important than performance

Match report – Player ratings – Arteta reaction – Video

9 games to go. 9 stomach-churning, heart-wrenching, arse-clenching games to go.

Arsenal restored the 5 point lead at the top of the table with a 2-1 win over Chelsea yesterday, but did it in a way to exert maximum impact on our heart rates and blood pressure. I’m not complaining, just sharing my experience of a game that was in one way as tight as you’d expect, but in another less comfortable than it probably should have been.

The team was as expected, Eberechi Eze continuing in midfield with no sign of Martin Odegaard on the bench, but Kai Havertz was fit to take his place there. The start to the game was cagey, Arsenal coming to terms with an unusual deployment of Cole Palmer on the left (mostly), and Chelsea had a good chance when a free kick deflected into the path of Mamadou Sarr but he couldn’t sort his feet out and put it wide.

After that, I think we got to grips with them, and took the lead through a corner. Bukayo Saka’s delivery to the back post was excellent, Gabriel’s run and header back across was perfectly timed, and William Saliba’s close range header flicked in off Sarr. For all the inevitable ‘Oh god another set-piece goal from Arsenal’ stuff, not enough is said for the consistent quality of our deliveries and the determination and decisiveness of the players who get on the end of them. They may not to be to your taste, and I think we all prefer more beautiful goals, but we’re very, very good at this and it’s not an accident or down to some kind of random chaos.

I think we should have done more after that goal. There were a couple of moments when Eze’s first touch let him down when we got the ball to him in dangerous areas, and a couple of moments when Viktor Gyokeres found Chelsea’s defenders much less accommodating than the ones he faced last weekend. With Robert Sanchez wobbly in their goal, it was a bit frustrating we couldn’t build on the lead.

Late in the first half, I thought we were quite lucky not to have conceded a penalty when Declan Rice, in the process of very obviously holding his counterpart as a corner was delivered, raised an elbow and directed the ball towards our goal. David Raya, under incredible pressure from the scrum of red and blue shirts around him, made a superb save, but if that had happened up the other end, I’d have been very unhappy we weren’t awarded a spot kick. From the resulting corner though, the scores were level, Piero Hincapie flicking a header into his own net, and just before the break was a painful time to concede.

There was another Chelsea penalty shout as they began the second half well, this time I don’t think merited one as Raya punched the ball off the top of Joao Pedro’s head, but I didn’t much like the opening stages of the second period. Again though, we worked our way back into it. Gabriel Martinelli came on for Leandro Trossard who I thought did quite a good job of knitting things together in tight areas, but his final action or pass was uniformly awful all day. Not quite blowing hot and cold, more like lukewarm and freezing.

There was frustration was twice Raya was impeded when trying to play it out quickly, and the referee stopped the game each time when he could have played advantage and then doled out the requisite yellow cards. In the 66th minute, an Arsenal free kick in their half led to a corner which Rice delivered with quality again, Sanchez came for and got nowhere near and Jurrien Timber was there to nod home from close range to make it 2-1. Again, quality of delivery was key, but so too Timber’s desire.

To top it off, Chelsea then had a player sent off. I had missed Neto’s first booking, so when he tried to hack Martinelli down but the Arsenal winger continued down the wing, I was very frustrated when the referee once again blew his whistle rather than play advantage. However, the second yellow was a lovely surprise, and surely from here, we could see this one out comfortably.

Arsenal: “Hold my beer!”

For the second time this season against 10 man Chelsea in the Premier League, we struggled. We couldn’t find the composure to just keep the ball, play the game at our own pace, and kill it as a contest. For a team famed for its control earlier in the season, it was hard to watch. Rice had to come off with a problem, so Christian Norgaard came on with all his experience and calm, and played 2 passes in 20 minutes. That’s not an indictment of him as much as the team, but it tells a story.

After the red card, Arsenal had 35% possession, made just 56 passes to Chelsea’s 115, and ultimately had Raya to thank for the three points. Eze did force Sanchez into a decent save, but it was the other Spaniard whose importance to this team was paramount once again. A fingertip stop from a Garnacho cross with just a couple of minutes of injury time to play helped ensure this game didn’t end with the kind of sucker punch that would, after some recent lapses of a similar nature, have created ripples of uncertainty for the rest of the season.

Chelsea did have the ball in the back of the net after Raya had made two more outstanding stops but the flag was rightly up for offside despite Gary Neville on Sky trying to create drama with his interminable ‘ooourrrggh’ noises and insistence the Chelsea player was in a legal position. Replays showed he was miles off. But the final whistle went, Arsenal took all three points, and my heart started beating again.

Afterwards, Mikel Arteta referenced the period after they had the red card, saying:

We should have managed that situation better, but we can talk about that tomorrow!

They should talk about it, because it’s basic stuff. There was a moment when we had the ball at the back with 93 minutes on the clock, and Gabriel could have just played it outside to Hincapie, who could play it back to him or up the line to keep recycling possession, but instead he tried a Hollywood pass to Havertz and gave the ball back to them. It was from there they fashioned a moment in our box which Gabriel blocked and ultimately that offside chance, and there was just no need to give them that.

And on this being an ‘ugly win’, Arteta said:

It’s not ugly. You have to play the game that is there for you to play, and against Chelsea, you know exactly the game that you’re going to play. For me, it’s a beautiful game to play because they have so much quality, and you have to adapt so much to what they do, and they have to do the same against us. So the margins are very, very small, and the duels at the end decide these kinds of games. Hopefully we can play many top games like this.

I think it’s fairly normal that as the number of remaining fixtures dwindle, the way we experience them will, in circumstances like this, become more and more fraught. The margin for error evaporates, so we know how vital every point is. It’s also fair to say that our experience as Arsenal fans is, if not unique, certainly heightened by our own ambitions/fears.

We weren’t the only title challenger to win a very tight game by a one goal margin this weekend. Through a different prism, Man City’s 1-0 win over Leeds might be seen as ‘inevitable’, a mark of potential champions win etc. It’s hard for us to see that win over Chelsea as similar, but it could easily be presented that way. The flip side is that both Arsenal and City found it hard work against tough opposition, and we had enough to overcome that. Their win was not easy, nor was ours. This is the Premier League.

I also think that how we experience games like this as fans and how the players will feel are, thankfully, very different. For me it was an ordeal, again something to endure, while for them it was a hard-fought victory based on their commitment and quality and effort against a very good team who gave us plenty of tactical problems. I might worry about certain aspects of the performance, they’ll be thinking ‘That’s another 3 points in the bag, onto the next one’.

And in the end, at this point of the season, for all the analysis of how we won, the only that really matters is that we won. Can we play better? I think so. But I’d swap performance level for points every weekend between now and May, without hesitation. Every game is a learning experience, and you have to look at what you can improve, but we had a job to do yesterday which was to ‘just win’, and that’s what we did. Now, we turn our attention to Brighton on Wednesday because that now matters a lot more than yesterday.

Ok, I’ll leave it there this morning. Stand by for an Arsecast Extra, as always. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com. So fire away using 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. The pod should be out around midday.

For now, have a good one.

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