Nottingham Forest vs Arsenal: The Debrief

Frustration bubbles up but the big picture is positive

In the summer I could feel that this season was going to be a tense one. It has gone pretty darn well, especially considering the injuries that Arsenal have had to contend with but that has not stopped any minor bump in the road from turning into a potential meltdown.

My worry that the negativity and frustration would continually bubble up has borne out and even though I have expected it, it can still be a pain to deal with it.

I can understand the frustration and disappointment; I share that feeling at times and especially after dropped points. What is harder to deal with is that things so often go into overdrive and not sharing the same feelings that everything is going wrong and that the team is doomed feels like an outlier position.

Taking a tiny step back and you can see that Arsenal finds themselves in a great position regardless of the disappointing dropped points.

They are top of the table, they have a 7-point lead over second, they have the best goal difference, and the best expected goals difference. They have by far the best defensive record and compliment that with the second/third-best attacking numbers in the league. On top of that, the team has a lead in a semifinal, is top of the Champions League and have advanced to the 4th round of the FA Cup for the first time since 2023.

It is no one’s ideal to see Arsenal drop points, let alone see it happen three times in short span but putting that into context of still managing to gain ground on rivals softens the blow.

We’d all like to see Arsenal with a bigger and more comfortable lead but even with a touch of a stumble, Arsenal did not get punished.

Let’s get more into this specific match and break it down a bit more.

Nottingham Forest vs Arsenal: The Graphics

Nottingham Forest vs Arsenal: The Debrief

15 - Shots for Arsenal

4 - Big chances for Arsenal in this match

6 - Shots for Arsenal that were rated as 20% or better scoring opportunities

0.15 - The average shot quality for Arsenal in this match, that would be the third highest this season and the highest with at least 15 shots taken.

There is a lot of frustration with this match and that is understandable, with Manchester City losing unexpectedly and Arsenal facing the team in 17th place that felt like a big +3 point swing all but sewn up. That didn’t pan out in this match and that is going to be painful because it feels like something taken away.

I definitely felt the frustration post-match but more because this can a stupid sport sometimes that doesn’t always reward teams for how well they play than thinking that this was a putrid performance.

You can’t perfectly go back and counter factual a match but given the quality of shots that Arsenal had in this match, this turns in a goal scored more than 90% of the time and is multiple goals 70% of the time.

If Arsenal do put away one of the chances that they have who knows what happens after. The chances were there for Arsenal to have done it but it didn’t happen in this game.

I don’t think that Arsenal were fantastic here but this was far closer to a standard good performance for Arsenal this season than the disaster or embarrassment that this seems to be viewed as after the result.

Arsenal matched their season average of shots but averaged higher average quality. That made the xG higher than average, but it was negated with Arsenal only putting three shots on target here (with another that was in what I would classify as “close”).

Arsenal were not nearly as dominate at pushing Forest back into their box here posting one of their lowest field tilts of the season and that also was reflected with significantly more time in the defensive and middle thirds.

This has been a new wrinkle that we have seen from Arteta against teams that are bunkered a bit more, trying to draw them out and open more space. I think you can say that it wasn’t massively effective and Forest were fine to let Arsenal have the ball out there and they would clog the middle of the pitch and hope for the best out wide.

Looking at what Arsenal did passing in the middle third it shows exactly this, Forest content to let Arsenal progress out wide but giving nothing in the middle or even the half spaces.

With Arsenal’s play further from goal than normal that changes the dynamics of who ends up on the ball. Of the more attacking/creative players only Noni Madueke ends up in the top five here (also there were more subs among this group).

This gives us a good bridge to talk about the captain in this match.

Odegaard ghosts

27 - Touches in this match. There have been just three instances where Odegaard has played 50+ minutes for Arsenal and had fewer touches, 24 vs Brighton last season (Red Card match), 21 at home vs Manchester City in January 2022 in a 2-1 loss, and 24 away against Manchester City in August 2021 in a 5-0 loss.

21 - Pass Attempts (9th on Arsenal), 18 passes completed for 85.7% pass completion percentage with a 110.1% pass efficiency compared to expected passing

1 - Final 3rd Entry Passes

2 - Progressive Passes

2 - Box Entry Passes

1 - Key Pass for 0.18 xA

0 - Shots taken

0 - Dribbles Completed out of 1 attempted, plus 1 time fouled.

1 - Deep Touch

0 - Interceptions, blocked passes, or fouls

1 - Ball recovery

This was a poor outing from Odegaard, he was effectively marked out of the game by Forest and he never found a way to get on the ball nor was he able to effectively take up space in dangerous areas. He was rightly taken off early in this match and this is the type of match where the expectations are that he will be able to provide more as one of the main creators for the team.

He is the captain of the team and one of the leaders, but that doesn’t make him immune from criticism. This is a match where he was well off his best and didn’t have it. Maybe he’s feeling the effects of the busy schedule and needs a match off but regardless we expect him to provide more here.

This performance has re-ignited the discussion around his role and place in the team. That’s fine and I think that on the totality he’s still been the best option for the role. This has also brought people back to the period with him injured and re-spinning this period.

Not the only example but something that is pretty representative of what I have seen

Arsenal did an amazing job to be able to cope with the injuries and pick up points over this period. This has been reinterpreted as Arsenal played great free flowing attacking football over that period and that just isn’t true at all. There is no way to do a controlled experiment to isolate a single players impact, but the evidence pretty strongly suggests that with him, Arsenal are a better attack (not quite as clear about absolutely better, but I’d lean that way).

This run featured some great performances from Arsenal, they beat Atletico and Tottenham by large margins, and he came back into the team just as the team put a legit claim to best team in the world with a convincing win against Bayern.

In this period without Odegaard, Arsenal leaned into the strengths that they had and played lock down defensive football, going on a crazy defensive run that saw them not allow a shot on target over the course of a full month. This was the height of the concern about Arsenal ruining the game with set plays and the seemingly never-ending worry about the open play creation where they were averaging under 1 open play expected goal.

I said at the time that I did not care particularly about open play vs set play and that remains true. What matters is creating more than your opposition because that is the best way to win matches in the long term. I loved all of those wins but I can’t help but be a bit annoyed that many of the same people that were leading the charge that Arsenal were boring are not changing their story that period was actually great.

That period was great, this period ain’t so bad either. I am sure this won’t be the last of it.

Getting Comfortable with Rotation

3 - Changes for Arsenal from their last match in the Premier League

2 - Changes for Arsenal from their last match against Chelsea in the League Cup semi-final

7 - Changes for Arsenal from the match at the last weekend against Portsmouth in the FA Cup third round.

One of the last things that I want to highlight here is that Arsenal have rotated over this December/January period and while that is what many fans say they want to see, what they really seem to mean is that the team should be able to rest players and there be zero drop off and if there is well then you should not have done that.

Most fans are inherently irrational, and that is okay. I do hope that fans that read this newsletter are a bit more rational and can try not to hold too many mutually exclusive thoughts in their heads at the same time.

Arsenal have been burned by trying to rely on a small squad in the past, that has led to accusations that Mikel Arteta has run his players into the ground (especially Saka). One of the major departures in team building philosophy from Arsenal this season has been to make the squad larger with more talent deeper into the depth chart.

This also plays into the demand for seeing the club win silverware and the discussion about Arsenal’s repeated failure at the semi-final stage of competitions.

Arsenal seemingly chose to go closer to full strength this week in the first leg of their semi-final against Chelsea and showing a willingness to trust the squad against Forest. The big rotation was Bukayo Saka, and this was a continued trend where in this busy festive period, he has not started three matches in a row.

I am a certified not rater of the League Cup, it is the least important of the competitions that Arsenal are in this season. I don’t measure success on winning trophies because it is a noisy and unreliable indicator of how well a team is doing, so I have never been a “Arsenal must win a trophy” guy.

All that being made clear, if you get to a semi-final of a competitions, I have no problem with the team taking it seriously. Winning trophies might be a less-than-ideal measure for if a team is doing well or not, but they are still kind of the point of why the matches are played. Winning a trophy is a great memory and experience, we should try to have more of those.

I won’t be complaining about the decision to tilt things that way on how the lineups were picked. Maybe you could talk me into how the profile of players suited the matches that they played in but I think that is largely a marginal issue. I think that maybe Trossard vs Chelsea and Martinelli vs Forest was backwards given the styles of the matches. I think maybe you could have asked if the chance to try something like an Eze in left midfield could have been tried against a team like Forest compared to the standard midfield. Ultimately, I am not so confident that is the case to make it a major deal.

I would make the case further, that we as fans will need to be able to get more comfortable that there will be changes that we don’t always like (just like there won’t be wholesale rotation when some might want it).

On that note, hopefully Arsenal can get back to winning ways on Tuesday with a lineup that I am sure will be too strong for some fans.