Chelsea will continue to look vulnerable until the new manager solves their deep-seated issues and his ideas have taken rootThiago Silva paused with the ball on the halfway line. Alongside him, his teammates were pointing and shouting at him to do something with it. Up in the stands, the various strands of encouraging advice being proffered by Chelsea fans had essentially congealed into a single unintelligible noise – something like faacckkinggettrrrrid, if we were going to try and transcribe it. And so it was that in the final minute of injury time, with Chelsea rousing themselves in search of a late equaliser, their chosen tactic was to pump a high ball up to the 5ft 7in Raheem Sterling.As it happened,...
Injury crisis is exposing a lack of co-ordinated recruitment for a manager whose success has come on a budgetImagine you are Graham Potter. You consider Arsenal’s probable team to face your Chelsea side today. You look at Mikel Arteta’s front three. You are not sure who will play on the right but even with Ben Chilwell injured again you have Mark Cucurella to play on that side of the defence as well as the option of a more attacking wing-back. Then you look at the other flank, where Gabriel Martinelli has been in sensational form. You remember how he embarrassed Emerson Royal and unsettled Trent Alexander-Arnold, how his pace and directness have troubled teams all season. With Reece James out,...
Brazilian is a master of grafting and chasing, finding the gaps and quietly making the players around him look a little betterFive-nil. But then, Manchester City just look so strong at the moment. Still: five- nil. But that injury to Bukayo Saka, how much of a blow could that be? Anyway, it was five-nil. But those Nottingham Forest chances, the Jesse Lingard shot where Gabriel Magalhães basically passes it straight to him, one day those are going to cost you. And yet, check the scoreboard, girls and boys: five-nil.It is the eternal gift of Arsenal fans to be able to identify the potential anxiety in virtually any situation, however favourable or triumphant. Pleasure is simply misery deferred. Most people look for...
What Arsenal have done this season is already remarkable, even if signs of fatigue are already starting to showTitles races often hinge on single moments – or at least our memories of them, the narratives we construct to process them, do. Stan Cullis’s non-tackle, Ray Tinkler’s idiosyncratic interpretation of offside, Steve Bruce’s header, Newcastle’s 4-3 defeat at Anfield, Sergio Agüero’s finish, Riyad Mahrez skipping by Nicolás Otamendi – far more uplifting to remember the moments of brilliance and infamy, to isolate heroes and villains, than to consider the grand sweeps of economic determinism. Gossip and goals tend to be more fun than Marxist analyses.Manchester City will almost certainly win the Premier League and they will do so because of the...
The Arsenal duo, on opposite sides of the pitch, put in the sort of work that used to be Liverpool’s trademarkIt seemed fitting that the last significant act of this game should be Gabriel Martinelli veering and skittering about in the far left-hand corner of the pitch, still with that maniacal, ferrety energy in his feet, still picking away furiously at the Liverpool defence.He was relentless at the Emirates Stadium, a pest, a nag, a constant creative press, in a game that saw him torture not just one but two Liverpool right-backs, Trent Alexander-Arnold having left the field at the break after a collision in the first half. Continue reading...