Arsenal 0-0 Newcastle United: Instant Reaction
A cagey match, that neither team controlled, and neither did the referee
No preamble, let’s just jump in.
Headline: Arsenal treated as title favorites
After the results of the weekend, depending on where you look Arsenal moved into the top spot for being the favorite for winning the title. Newcastle came to London and played exactly like you would expect a midtable team (they aren’t but they did seem to have that mentality tonight) going up against the best team in the league.
I think that to a certain extent is a mark of respect for Arsenal. Newcastle came in and survived Arsenal’s early blitz and mostly were able to cut out the space that Arsenal wanted to play in.
A new thing I am looking at is passing networks by “quarter”. In the first quarter Arsenal dominated and then in the middle quarters Arsenal didn’t quite have the same control and struggled to get the ball into the final third as often. In the last quarter Arsenal did push back Newcastle and piled on some pressure but never created the clear-cut chance.
This was one of Arsenal’s weakest xG match of the season for Arsenal and I think it was down to a bit to Arsenal being a bit off and partly down to Newcastle just being a good defensive team.
In the opening 10 minutes Arsenal created their best chances and on another day Arsenal have their early lead like they did against Brighton but today the shots didn’t go in.
Overall, this was a match where the shots were all through traffic and it was not one for creating chances.
A note: I don’t like to blame the referees but this is one where it did seem like he lost control of things. He seemed like he got bullied by Newcastle, they seemed to force him into a yellow against Odegaard, he didn’t really punish the rotational fouling (Newcastle had 16 fouls, with 3 players who committed 3 and 2 players that committed 2), and missed a pretty blatant foul in the box for a shirt pull that had been established as a yellow card type offense earlier in the match.
Oh, and the timekeeping sucks and makes me miss the big added time numbers of the World Cup. In this match, the ball was in play for just 53 minutes, which is well below the 61 minutes that the average Premier League match has. Newcastle wanted to waste time whenever they could and they got their wish. Fair play to them if that is how the game is going to go.
Stock Rising: Oleksandr Zinchenko
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