Unai Emery's players must be prepared to pull their weight to give life to Arsenal revival
It is a measure of how far Arsenal fell under Arsène Wenger last season that Unai Emery was never seriously expected to win here against Manchester City today, his first competitive game in charge of the club. And so what metric of success can we use to fairly gauge this performance? How harshly do we judge this disappointing initial outing?
Emery deserves a degree of patience before he is pilloried. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that, on this occasion, his big decisions backfired. Arsenal were overrun in midfield until Lucas Torreira was introduced after it was too late. 19-year-old Mattéo Guendouzi was handed a debut but does not look quite ready. Meanwhile Petr Cech, who was preferred in goal to £22.5m summer arrival Bernd Leno, should have done better with Raheem Sterling's opener and almost conceded a comical second when he bizarrely passed the ball directly behind him and out of play.
There were also clear indicators that the stylised, high-intensity brand of football Emery wants his players to produce will take a significant amount of time to implement. “We are at the beginning of a new process,” he stressed in his pre-match press conference, and the rapid counter-attacking play that characterised Emery’s Valencia and Sevilla teams was notable by its absence here. As was anything approaching a consistent press.
Much has been made of Arsenal’s incomings this summer and yet, with Emery naming an unexpectedly familiar starting XI, it was the club’s big, established stars which ultimately let him down. Granit Xhaka did absolutely nothing to make Guendouzi’s life any easier in midfield while Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was completely isolated up top. And deployed slightly deeper than usual, Mesut Ozil was kept on the periphery throughout.
For many, the fatal flaw of Wenger’s tortured third act as Arenal manager will always be that he placed far too much reliance on Ozil in a tactical system that lacked discipline, a player who is sublime when he fancies it but utterly tangential otherwise. You’ve already heard the full repertoire of Ozil criticisms, of course. He doesn’t run enough. He doesn’t score enough. He doesn’t really do enough — a player whose form flutters and murmurs far too frequently to be relied upon as the heartbeat of a top-four team.
Such criticism misses the point. Because at his best Ozil is more than all of that, and expecting him to charge mindlessly from one box to the other is a bit like taking a trip to The Royal Ballet only to ask Carlos Acosta what his floss is like. After all, Ozil is but as good as the movement around him. Against City there was desperately little of that, with the German far too frequently forced to drop deep to bail out Héctor Bellerín, even when Arsenal were chasing the game. By the end of the game their heat maps were barely discernible.
The worry for Arsenal is that, when asked to play within a more constrictive system, the influence of players like Ozil and Henrikh Mkhitaryan could decrease. And watching an ill-equipped Ozil grow increasingly exasperated, with all the frustrated grandeur of a master watchmaker applying the painstaking finishing touches to a restoration atop a double-decker bus, was only made more interesting by the counterpoint of Bernardo Silva, who occupied a similar role in City’s midfield and yet never found himself frozen out of the action for long.
In fact, stationed between the impressive Sterling and debutant Riyad Mahrez, Silva stroked the ball around with such ease that you found your eyes violently darting to the scoreboard to check that, yes, this was a Premier League match after all and, no, the International Champions Cup hadn't been quietly extended by a further week. Arsenal’s makeshift back four never got close, particularly when he lashed home City’s decisive second midway through the second-half.
But then Silva has the luxury of playing under Guardiola, who is now entering his third season in charge of City, a side that are beginning to look staggeringly close to the top of their game. The team is settled. The system works. The players know their responsibilities.
Whereas for the first time in a generation, Arsenal’s squad have been forced to completely recalibrate their approach to playing in matches such as this. It takes more than exceptionally high fitness levels to implement a new formation and full-hearted press: it also requires hours on the pitch and match-honed co-ordination. This is what Arsenal are up against.
It will take a while for the aura to return to this ground too, for Emery to approach matches such as these with the genuine belief that his side is good enough to prevail. But there is an argument the Spaniard will have learnt more from this one match than Wenger did from the whole of last season. That in itself is surely progress.
