Arsenal may have only exited the title race for about two-and-a-half hours. They were soon readmitted, reprieved by a result in Bournemouth. The prospect of an eight-point deficit to Manchester City disappeared. In a division where there has scarcely been room for error, there was now some. Arsenal’s task still seems implausible, but it is not quite impossible.
And yet they finished Saturday behind Nottingham Forest in the Premier League table after delivering their worst performance of the season in what promises to be a defining week. Newcastle, Inter Milan and Chelsea present a trio of examinations on the road and the Arsenal that Mikel Arteta has constructed seem designed with such tasks in mind. They may be Arteta’s Arsenal 3.0, the battle-hardened rebrand.
The notion of Arteta as the purist turned puritan, the new Jose Mourinho, has gained currency and provided irritation of late. If, earlier in the season, there was the best of George Graham’s Arsenal in the way the Spaniard’s side defended, perhaps there was the worst of it at St James’ Park, a lumpen 4-4-2 producing a dreary display in a 1-0 defeat.
On such occasions, pragmatism becomes unpragmatic, a policy of reducing games to small numbers of chances backfiring when Arsenal had too few of their own. Maybe it was simply a bad day at the office, but it felt Arteta was trying to plot a path to the title by eliminating errors and seeking the efficiency Mourinho once used to dethrone an earlier Arsenal side.
Has it come at the expense of flair? Take away home matches with promoted sides and Arsenal have 10 goals in eight games against the clubs who were in the Premier League last season. Yet in Arteta’s defence, that does include two apiece against City and Liverpool and that tally could be higher were Arsenal always able to keep 11 players on the pitch.
Nor, with points dropped in five of their last eight games, have Arsenal been efficient enough. It was, Arteta said at St James’ Park, a problem of execution, not strategy. “It’s about being our best selves every single week,” he said. “Today we weren’t our best version.” He cited a lack of threat, a need to improve “a lot of things that we are doing with the ball consistently”.
But it can seem a consequence of choices, of squad construction where a solitary player is given responsibility for one aspect, where Arsenal can look more reliant on set-pieces to score. For instance, Gabriel Martinelli is the only attacker likely to run in behind defences regularly. Martin Odegaard is the only senior creative midfielder in the squad; if the decisions to allow both Emile Smith Rowe and Fabio Vieira to leave without being replaced – except by a strapping, more defensive, less inventive presence in Mikel Merino – was designed partly to free up a path to the side for wunderkind Ethan Nwaneri, Odegaard’s absence for the last two months has come at a cost.
The best players are irreplaceable because of their standards; it is unrealistic to think Arsenal would have an understudy for the Norwegian of the same class. The test instead is of how big a drop-off is, how a team compensates. On Saturday, Arsenal did not, in effect removing Odegaard’s role by abandoning the 4-3-3 Arteta often uses for 4-4-2.
Meanwhile, a familiar criticism is that Arsenal lack a predatory striker. Given Kai Havertz’s terrific form this season, it often feels an outdated one. It reflects a concerted choice by Arteta, though: even with Eddie Nketiah’s departure, he did not recruit a specialist No 9. The problem, perhaps, is not Havertz as much as the fact his deputy has certain similarities and Gabriel Jesus’ only goal in his last 26 appearances came against Preston.
With Odegaard absent, Arsenal’s attacking efforts have been powered by Bukayo Saka and Havertz this season. Leandro Trossard’s goals have dried up. Martinelli’s only came against Leicester and Southampton. Raheem Sterling has only scored or assisted against League One Bolton.
One way or another, they feel short of one more quality attack-minded player; perhaps it was supposed to be Vieira, given a £35m signing is now out on loan.
It has all been compounded by the complications of a stop-start season, interrupted by injuries and red cards. There are explanations why Arsenal have not been at their most fluent. Declan Rice had a slow start to the campaign, Merino a delayed one. Nevertheless, it is a theme that Arteta’s technicians can find themselves together on the bench: Jorginho, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Nwaneri all began there at Newcastle. If the old criticism was that Arsenal were all style and no steel, they seemed the opposite on Saturday.
The chances are that visits to Inter and Chelsea will see Arteta reach for the comfort blanket of solidity, of physicality. Clean sheets could be prioritised by a side who had set their stall out to be relentless and remorseless.
And yet a seven-point gap to Liverpool will not be made up by shutouts alone. A squad with Arteta’s idiosyncratic imprint could do with rediscovering their scoring touch and their creative instincts.