match report – player ratings – arteta reaction
In the 20+ years I’ve been doing Arseblog, Arsenal have been involved in some poor quality football matches. Last night’s 1-0 win over Bodo/Glimt is up there with the worst.
A 1-0 away win in Europe is always a decent result, but don’t hesitate, there wasn’t much to enjoy from our performance and, if we’re being objective about it, the home team deserve some of that based on the chances they they had.
The highlight of the first half was Bukayo Saka coming to life, briefly, playing a give-and-take with Albert Sambi Lokonga, and scoring what might be called an unconventional goal. His attempt was blocked by a defender, the ball bounced, deflected backwards and went into the back of the net with the keeper stranded. We had a moment or two after that. Saka shot wide with his left foot, and Eddie Nketiah had a chance to upset the keeper, but he made poor contact on the spin.
The best chances came at the other end. Pellegrino went clean on goal, but his shot lacked sparkle and opened it wide with only Matt Turner to beat. In the second half, we continued a theme by taking some of the most terrifying shots football has ever seen, while Bodo/Glimt didn’t make the most of their opportunities.
Turner made a decent save from a guy; Solbakken was allowed time and space to shoot from outside the box; and around the hour mark they really should have been level, but Espejord managed to get the ball over the bar from about 8 yards out. Defensively we were a bit all over the place, and it says something that our standout player on the night was our goalkeeper. I think there will always be doubts about the distribution of him, but he read the game well and was smart and alert to clear the potential danger on more than one occasion.
Having started a fairly strong team, Mikel Arteta made changes throughout the second half, with the looming threat of injury on an artificial pitch appearing to be a consideration. These surfaces are much, much better than they used to be, but you could see the Arsenal players misjudging the roll of the ball by making passes more than once, and I don’t know if this is possible, but it felt like I was over there. it was an instruction not to do anything that might cause a pinch or strain. You hear say that a team did not go out of the first gear, sometimes it seemed that we were at a standstill.
However, it is a victory, and an important one for the good of the group. It means we will finish first if we beat PSV in the next game, and after that, there are two more group stage games where Mikel Arteta can properly rest his ‘first’ team players and maybe give him one or two opportunities to some children of the Academy.
Later, the manager said:
“Really happy to win here against a team that has won the last 14 games in a row in European competition, so they deserve a lot of credit for doing that.
“We have talked about this in the last few days, that was the challenge, in different conditions, in different contexts, to make a lot of changes, to find a way to win, and we have achieved it.
“In terms of quality, in terms of dominance and how we want to play, obviously there’s a lot to improve on from what we did today, but it’s another win, let’s move on, it’s Leeds now.”
And I really don’t know what else I can add to that. is a victory. Victory is good. Performance was below average. Looks like we got out of it uninjured. That’s good… and now we turn our attention to Leeds. This is the reality of the Europa League group stage. Games, with all due respect to competition and opposition, are essentially throwaways. They are very rarely stored in memory banks, they are forgotten almost as quickly as they happen. Get the points and move on. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
We’ll have a podcast for you a little later this morning, so stay tuned. For now, take it easy.
