Headline: Mistakes are punished, but maybe to conservative
There is no sugar coating it today, the mistakes Arsenal made cost them and when you do that on the road against a team as good as Bournemouth you are going to make it very hard on yourself.
The first big mistake was Trossard playing a very weird, volleyed back pass that caught everyone off guard and wasn’t really to anyone.
The second big mistake was Saliba panicking and pulling down Evanilson who had gotten a step on him reacting better to the back pass, that ends up as a red card.
The last mistake was Kiwior under hitting his back pass under pressure and Evanilson having the ball again bearing down on goal, that ends up as a penalty.
The first two mistakes play into the red card. I think that is a red card more often than not, my first impression was that he was lucky to only be shown a yellow card because I was thinking that was 60/40 or even 70/30 type call, yeah it was pretty far from goal, but it was central and it wasn’t obvious that Ben White covers that ground quick enough to cover. What I am a little more frustrated was that this was sent for review at the monitor because I don’t think it is a clear mistake for it to be a yellow card. Alas it was and I can’t get that mad at it because it was two bad mistakes and more the right call than the wrong call.
This is a big swing of 1.1 goals and shifts the win probability from 55% for Arsenal to 28% and from 19% to 46% for Bournemouth.
The mistake is frustrating, but it also just felt like the team was struggling to generate anything of note and then seemed to give too much respect to Bournemouth after the fact.
Before the red card there was pretty minimal thrust from Arsenal:
Shots: 1 to 1
xG: 0.03 to 0.03
Touches in the box: 9 to 4, favoring Arsenal
Final third touches: 49 to 29, favoring Arsenal
That’s just not very good and even with the injuries to Arsenal you have to think that this team can and should be able to do better than this.
Obviously going down to 10 men, isn’t going to make things look good but it was overall an abysmal attacking performance.
It is probably unfair but I can’t help but think if this were Manchester City in the situation where they were down a player they would have likely still looked more like themselves.
Maybe the damming thing is, this is Arsenal looking like themselves right now.
Conservatism bites Arteta
I cant help but come away with my other take away being that Arteta was bitten by his too conservative nature here again. It has felt like too often Arteta wants to create just enough to win and no more than required. This is obviously not all the time but he is a bit too comfortable going with the let’s keep it tight and be hard to beat and generate just enough that we can scrape out a win.
It has worked in the past, and when you have a talent advantage it will more often that it doesn’t. What it does do and why I believe it is a suboptimal game model is that if you are not perfect on the keep it tight part, like Arsenal were here, it can put you in a very difficult spot to come back from.
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