match report – player ratings – for the qualifications – Video
Arsenal remain top of the Premier League, despite a frustrating day at Old Trafford yesterday.
Mikel Arteta restored Oleksandr Zinchenko to the side in place of Kieran Tierney, but other than that we hadn’t changed since Aston Villa. United started pretty well in the first ten minutes or so, but the game changed when Arsenal scored, but then the goal was disallowed by VAR.
I think it’s extremely soft, the kind of decision that a local team makes, and I find it difficult to square this new edict of ‘let it go’ with what we saw yesterday. If that hadn’t allowed a goal, there wouldn’t have been any more analysis on it, and it only strengthens my belief that VAR is a pox in the game, and it’s ruining football for the fans and everyone watching on TV around the game. . world.
I guess there’s no point in talking about it now, but what a pass Bukayo Saka was to Gabriel Martinelli, and the way the Brazilian seized the opportunity, running before firing past David de Gea with his left foot into the corner. more remote. it was sensational. But the video spoilers had to be about them, Paul Tierney went to take a look and it seemed to be taking so long that it gave me a glimmer of hope that he could trust the initial judgment of his own eyes, but no.
Instead of providing a gripping moment of the highest quality, the Premier League offered a tedious ‘drama’ more akin to a reality show than top-level sport. It’s like a Michelin star chef serving you a wonderful dish, only to take it away when you try to take a bite, replacing it with a plate of his own shit.
Later, Martin Odegaard said:
I barely touched it, they keep saying this is the Premier League and they want it to be physical. I don’t understand how you can go back.
While Mikel Arteta lamented the lack of consistency. If you watched Brighton v Leicester yesterday, Youri Tielemans took Solly March off the ball to set up the opening goal, a much more obvious foul than Odegaard being too strong for Christian Eriksen and that goal stood. And people wonder why fans are close to boiling point with these kinds of decisions.
However, that incident woke us up and for the next hour I thought we played very well, as well as I had seen us play at Old Trafford in a long, long time. Except that we didn’t take full advantage of that domain. United scored through Antony after we parted ways a bit and our defensive positioning wasn’t what it should be, but I always felt if we continued we were going to bounce back.
It took longer than it should because we wasted good chances. Odegaard, in particular, should have scored early in the second half, but he missed the goal at his mercy, but it eventually came. Odegaard fed Jesus who kept the United defender at bay as he did brilliantly throughout the day, the ball broke for Saka and he made no mistake to make it 1-1.
United’s second came when we got a little complacent, perhaps a little too confident, giving the ball away in their half. It pains me to say it, but it’s a very good pass from Fernandes to Rashford who took advantage of it and scored. I think there are sometimes elements of inexperience in this team, and I wonder if William Saliba could learn from this one and fall a bit in the future. He had to turn around when the pass was made and he was never going to catch Rashford. Ben White almost came back to make an excellent block, but the ball shot past Ramsdale and into the net.
Mikel Arteta insisted afterwards that his triple substitution did not make the team more open when United scored the third, saying:
I do not think. The way we played, we have the same numbers on the baseline against the players that they had.
I really don’t agree. The problem for me, though, is that those changes initially left us a bit off balance, not in our proper form, and you could see that from the way United opened us up. Saliba was on the left, Eriksen looked to the side as he burst into a space where a midfielder should have been but wasn’t, and again Rashford finished when once again White nearly chased him down for a block.
It’s interesting how managers see things. I was watching the Merseyside derby on Saturday, and Liverpool were absolutely on top in the second half until Jurgen Klopp made a double switch (wings) that completely stopped their momentum. I can understand Arteta wanting to change something, but we had been playing so well that I felt three was probably too much at the time, especially from a manager who is normally quite cautious about how he uses his subs.
However, we did get to see Fabio Vieira, and there was a lot to like about his 15-minute cameo. He looks quick, hit a couple of shots and almost got the pass of the game with a curled ball to Martinelli as we were trying to get back in. I like the fact that we are a team that play with attacking intent, and going to Old Trafford and controlling the game that we did is encouraging, but I think we need to work on how we deal with teams like this who will be looking to hit us on the counter. As James said on Arsecast Extra, with Sp*rs coming soon, that’s a lesson we need to learn quickly.
In the end we had 16 shots but only 3 on target. We just didn’t make the most of our dominance from an attack perspective, Arteta later said:
It is a great lesson. If you want to win here you have to do everything very well and especially if you don’t do it there [defensively]then in the opposite goal with the number of chances we created we needed to score more goals.
There’s nothing we can do about it now, but it’s easy to understand why the manager was looking for ‘more firepower’ before the end of the transfer window before injuries changed our focus. We just have to get more out of the players we have, and I think they are capable.
In the end, it was a day of frustration because I think the game changes if Martinelli’s goal is allowed to stand as it should. We know how important the first goal in a game is, especially for this team that still has something to prove in those of us who are behind. There are lessons to be learned ahead and behind, but in terms of the way we played in general for a large majority of this match, you can easily take positives.
Loss was always going to come at some point, and losing to United in the usual way will scratch old wounds, but I would have been a lot more depressed this morning if we had played out of the park or simply not shown up. The day. That we learn quickly is the only thing that is in our hands, because like other teams, the VAR will fool us again at some point.
We can do better offensively, and defensively this was probably our weakest performance of the season, but it’s a game, and how we respond to this setback will give us a clearer picture of what this team is really capable of this season. .
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James and I recorded the Arsecast Extra for you last night, so to talk about United’s game in a bit more ‘heat of the moment’, all the links you need are below. Have a good.
Download – iTunes – Spotify – Acast – RSS
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