North London Derby: Instant Reaction

Thoughts at full time

Straight into it

Headline: It goes to plan

When I was thinking about this match in the run up to it this was pretty much exactly how I would have imagined Arsenal set up to play missing their entire first choice midfield.

I imagined that Spurs would be aggressive and push forward. They were at home and I expected that they would have most of the possession. For Arsenal I expected that they would want to be hard to play through, stay in shape, pick their spots to press and try and force a mistake but mostly look to try and catch Spurs on the break.

I also hoped that being able to generate something from set plays, exploiting the issues that Guglielmo Vicario has coming for balls in his six yard box.

Basically that is exactly what happened in this match and it was a beauty of a game.

Arsenal had some spells of possession in this match but mostly they let Spurs have the ball.

What Arsenal did to perfection here was not let Spurs get into the areas near the box where they could break through the Arsenal lines.

I don’t think Thomas Parey and Jorginho had a particularly pretty game but they were effective at keeping the Spurs midfielders from accessing the space central outside the box.

Maddison was not allowed space to deliver the ball into the box much at all and had just a decent game creating 2 chances and having most of his balls not find a teammate when he played it into the box.

Spurs were VERY effectively funneled wide and the best option was to try and play crosses into the box and that was no problem for Arsenal.

Overall Spurs played 31 crosses and had 24 from open play. They generated just four pretty tame shots from these looks.

Defensively this is Arsenal are their best. They were pretty content to let Spurs take speculative and low quality chances and to deal with their desperate attempts

In possession Arsenal were a bit sloppy and didn’t quite execute on some of the counter attacks that they had but overall it was enough. The biggest chance fell to Martinelli where he found himself free in the box. The big question is should he have passed and I think that this is a maybe or even probably type rating.

As he makes the determination here he should be able to spot Saka. Saka is being closed down hard here so his ability to take this with his preferred left might have been hard but he would have a lot of goal to aim at and it would turn a 25% chance into something probably in the 50-75% type range, where he just needs to make decent contact and play it somewhere on the middle right side of the goal.

I do like Martinelli’s ability to finish on this type of chance, where he loves to set him self to aim for the far post he just can’t quite get wide enough.

There were a few other chances where Arsenal had a chance and some good last line defending stopped Arsenal.

In the end Arsenal got their goal and overall played a professional and effective game. This team shows so much maturity and seems to love defending almost as much as they love attacking. It isn’t the way Arsene Wenger would have done it but you can’t deny that it has paid dividends.

Stock Rising: Jurrien Timber