Silly Spurs stumbled directly into a very obvious if immaculately-constructed Arsenal trap. Plenty of thoughts here on Arteta, Ange, Vicario, Romero and woke kit nonsense…
That lack of creativity in the middle of the park goes a long way to explaining Arsenal’s failure to create much from open play here, but that Spurs themselves struggled just as much is a huge win for an Arsenal back four who did their jobs almost immaculately.
Scoring the only goal secured man-of-the-match honours for Gabriel, but it could just as easily have been William Saliba or Jurrien Timber. Those three in particular plus David Raya – Ben White had a slightly sketchier time at right-back – were the main reasons Arsenal left their local rivals with the result they wanted and needed.
And we absolutely know Nicolas Jover – lauded by Arteta after the game – will have loved it because if ever there were a set-piece coach who loves to see a plan come together, it’s that man.
Leicester and Newcastle were happy enough to let Spurs have the ball. We admittedly can’t truthfully say Everton, bless them, had any real say in it. But Arsenal here seemed to positively crave not having the ball. To the extent on some occasions that they seemed really quite alarmingly keen to hand it back in wildly unnecessary fashion. We think those were mainly errors, because it was generally Jorginho responsible and he was one Arsenal player who really didn’t appear to be enjoying himself all that much.
M’colleague Will Ford called it the most obvious of all the goals and it’s impossible to argue. The country’s best team at scoring from set-pieces against one of the very worst at defending them always felt like a case of when not if. Two of Arsenal’s goals in the 3-2 win here back in the spring came from set-pieces and the perfect way this one came together for Arsenal was an unimprovable microcosm for the game itself.
Guglielmo Vicario is now very literally a marked man. He has to find a solution to his set-piece disappearing act, or he is cooked. That would be a real shame because he is in almost every other way a superb goalkeeper.
But this inability to make his presence felt at set-pieces is going to wreck his career in Our League if he can’t find an answer soon. He had already flapped at one corner here, the ball grazing his knuckle on the way through before Arsenal uncharacteristically muffed the chance to put him under more pressure from the follow-up.
That reprieve only ever felt temporary, and so it proved. As two Arsenal and two Tottenham players tussled right in front of him, Vicario was simply unwilling or unable to get involved despite the set-piece thundering off the head of Gabriel only three yards in front of his starting position.
Cristian Romero was all too easily shoved off it by Gabriel and wasn’t even able to compete for the ball as the Arsenal defender powered it beyond the hapless Spurs keeper.
It was yet another moment to encapsulate far wider moods and vibes around these teams and their players.
We’re all familiar with the long-standing trope of YouTube highlight reels that can make the most humdrum attacking player look deceptively brilliant but even before this error we found ourselves wondering if Romero isn’t a rare and also unimprovable example of the defensive equivalent.
There are, for better and worse, very few more obvious or more visible defenders than Romero. His often violent mistakes are legion, but his very best work is absolutely captivating. Even here, just moments before it all went wrong for him, he’d completed some trademark, eye-catchingly heroic work in the right-back position.
It would be so easy to put together a 15-minute compilation that makes Romero look like the finest defender who ever lived. But it also feels like he’s costing his team a goal a week.
They didn’t have much of the ball because they didn’t want much of the ball. It is absolutely the way to play against this Spurs team, and while Arteta would presumably have liked to see rather more attacking verve from open play, the point is he’d set his team up in such a way that it wasn’t actively necessary. Not here.
There’s an enduring although now finally faltering myth that this Spurs team is a good attacking one. It isn’t. Sure, they will have days where everything clicks and anyone might get picked off, as Aston Villa found out six months ago. But that’s kind of the point: it was six months ago. It’s only happened against terrible teams since, and even then only sporadically.
Spurs have scored 21 goals in their last 15 Premier League games. They play like they are Man City, planning to dominate the ball and backing their ability to unlock any defence. But they can’t: they can only unlock really sh*t defences. If you don’t have one of those – and Arsenal demonstrably do not have a sh*t defence – you should be mainly fine.
Indeed, it’s now compellingly easy to make a case that the extent of Tottenham’s control of possession in almost all their matches, and the sheer number of bodies Angeballed into the attacking third to assist it, is now actively hurting them at both ends of the pitch.
They are a team who live constantly on edge with regards to the threat of teams counter-attacking them, but with the greater irony being that Spurs themselves actually look far more compelling an attacking side in swift counters of their own in which wide players are released and midfield support arrives late, rather than their now staid stock-in-trade of passing it around for three or four minutes before Brennan Johnson makes a disappointing decision or Dejan Kulusevski shoots narrowly over the bar from 20 yards.
But it’s still an idea that had a fair amount of appeal before today’s game and even more so after it. Arsenal are a side that can win when they don’t play well; Tottenham a team that can and frequently do lose when they play well.
The key element there, though, is that Spurs ‘play well’ only on their own terms. They clearly aren’t that bothered about not being able to defend set-pieces, or they’d have tried to do literally anything about it over the summer. They clearly aren’t that bothered that all their possession and territory and touches in the opposition box and other signs of supposed dominance leads to vanishingly few actual goals or even chances, or they’d have tried doing something about that as well.
On commentary, Peter Drury – in between his usual absurd nonsense, which today featured a line about airing dirty linen and some baffling old sh*te about the Postcode Lottery – frequently put forward the idea that both these sides might feel like they could and should have won all three of their previous games this season.
Arsenal had won two and drawn the other, a game in which they’d led 1-0 before having a player controversially sent off. They have also developed a method that wins matches an awful lot of the time. So yeah, they probably did feel that way.
Spurs, on the other hand, have battered an Everton side still on zero points in between drawing at Leicester and losing at Newcastle.
Sure, Spurs might feel like they should have won all those games, and indeed this one. But they would be wrong. At some point you have to acknowledge that it’s not really feasible to just be that damn unlucky that damn frequently.
In all three games Spurs bossed all those metrics like they usually do, and did again today. And now in three of those four games they have actually created very little while conceding catastrophically avoidable slapstick goals. Which again is not a new feature they’ve only just introduced this season.
Which does all make you wonder, doesn’t it? At what point does this stop being a bit of bad luck and start being evidence that actually this just isn’t really working any more? And an impish yet perfectly fair response to that question might be ‘several months ago, mate’.
Since that wild 4-0 win at top-four rivals Villa in March, Spurs have now played 15 Premier League games and won just five of them. Three of those wins have come against teams who are no longer in the division, one against an Everton side that might not be after this season the way it’s shaping up and the other a home win over Nottingham Forest in April that, fair’s fair, looks slightly better now than it might have a couple of days ago.
In that same run Spurs have now played seven games against other members of the ‘big eight’ – teams they might consider their natural rivals. They’ve lost all seven of those games, very often convincingly.
It’s increasingly hard to escape the idea that good teams have now completely worked them out, while a thumping defeat at Fulham and draws against West Ham and Leicester suggest pretty much anyone who isn’t in a truly terrible place can have a decent crack at them more often than not. It’s an awfully long time to go without a single win against anyone who isn’t a relegation candidate.
Arsenal’s midfield troubles were significant, but also only one part of the reason this was such a starkly difficult day for Arteta and his team. We already know they’re trying to do what not even Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool at their very best could do and stand toe-to-toe with Man City for a third consecutive season. The near flawless standard it requires must be utterly exhausting, and the fixture list following that Brighton setback was not kind.
With City making their way merrily and flawlessly to 12 points, Arsenal came into this game at their local rivals already five points adrift and facing a trip to City next weekend. An entirely plausible worst-case scenario, therefore, of being eight points adrift and already out of the title race. Impossible not to think about that. Even a draw here wouldn’t really have done any good if it was followed by defeat at City and a seven-point gap.
It takes some mental fortitude to go into a game under those conditions and emerge victorious with a gameplan that leaned so heavily upon inviting an at least theoretically dangerous opponent on and winning a third game in a row at their stadium.
And yet Arsenal never wavered or deviated from that plan. They sensed what was coming. They trusted the process. It’s been so long since the last goalless North London Derby that Emmanuel Adebayor played in it – for Arsenal. But just as it seemed like another might somehow materialise, the mistake Arsenal had counted on arrived as they knew it always would. And with equal certainty, they pounced upon it.
Bukayo Saka ended the day with the matchwinning assist but would be the first to acknowledge he had one of the quietest days he will have ever had as an attacking threat from open play. That was in large part down to the way he sacrificed his own game to the team’s overall plan.
A lot of great teams are characterised by the speed in which they can turn defence into unstoppable attack, but Arsenal’s finest quality may be the opposite and the speed with which they can turn attack into perfectly organised, impeccably drilled defence. Not once was Son Heung-min given one-on-one freedom to go past Ben White and having open ground in which to run.
There was one moment in the first half where he sent the Arsenal right-back for a hot dog only to find Saka still in his way. Saka sacrificed his own attacking potential to ensure Spurs’ was kept as limited as it could be, just as the plan dictated.
Not even Spurs’ shiny new stadium or Arsenal’s unnecessary (for multiple reasons) Lynx Africa away kit could stop this feeling like NLD heritage, so hats off to both teams for that.
And we’re not remotely convinced that all black against a Spurs kit that has just about as much navy blue as a Spurs kit can have is in any way a better solution to a problem we’re not at all sure even existed.
Above all, though, there’s this. A Spurs home shirt should not have all-navy sleeves. Yet the one game a season where that might actually be a legitimate benefit, to contrast with the white sleeves of Arsenal, has now been wasted. And also that this is the second time that’s happened, because when Spurs last had navy sleeves in 2005/6, Arsenal had their all-redcurrant Highbury farewell kit. Not the most important element of the day, sure, but still a silly one.
A harsh yellow card for Rodrigo Bentancur started a flurry of cautions that could easily have sent the game spiralling out of control, especially as the game’s one significant flashpoint came soon after.
For what it’s worth, Gillett got that one right and deserves plenty of credit for regaining full control of proceedings in the second half.
The big decision was, of course, yellow or red for Jurrien Timber after his studs found their way into Pedro Porro’s shins via the top of the ball.
We’re a bit on the fence with these tackles. We can see why players attempt them; done right it’s a way to win or retain possession while keeping control of the ball and placing a physical barrier between it and your opponent.
But while the benefits are clear, it equally clearly comes with risk because if it goes wrong it can be very dangerous and at the very least produce alarming-looking freeze-frames of studs hitting shin as the ball slides off the top of the ball.
For us, it all comes down to control. Players attempting this kind of tackle do so knowing that getting it wrong will be at least a yellow and gives both referee and VAR the chance to go bigger, so it’s always high risk. Think about where you see these kind of tackles happen, and it’s very often in the offending player’s attacking third – that is, in a spot where retaining possession is a sufficiently tempting reward to justify the inherent risk.
Sometimes it’s also because it’s an attacking player and they can’t tackle very well, but that’s not the case here as Timber showed in the rest of a brilliant display.
He took a risk, and it didn’t pay off. But what he didn’t do was lose control of the challenge as, say Curtis Jones did in a very similar part of this pitch last year or Cristian Romero does with every tackle he’s ever attempted. Timber’s foot does not continue with the same force after sliding over the top of the ball. It’s clearly not a good tackle in the end, but there’s nothing wild about it.
We don’t think VAR would’ve been in any rush to overturn it had Gillett opted for a red card, but yellow felt right on this occasion. The difference between this and Jones is undeniably subjective, but it’s a difference we would contend absolutely exists.
This is no short-term blip, this is an increasingly significant body of evidence. It’s a longer and worse run of form than the one that did for Mauricio Pochettino five years ago, a manager who had far more credit in the bank. It’s now 42 points from their last 32 games, and the trend is downwards. Since the win at Villa in March, it’s 17 points from 15 games. It’s 10 from the last 11. Since March, only Everton and Wolves have lost more Premier League games than Spurs.
They sit 13th in the league and appear wedded to an approach that requires doing all of the same things but expecting different outcomes. The general mood may not (yet) be so bleak as in the dog days of Antonio Conte’s joyless final season, but the sense of a club and team drifting along unable to escape its own self-fulfilling solipsism is undoubtedly back.
Spurs’ current run of results is one that means Postecoglou, less than a year after being anointed as Spurs’ latest messiah, must come under pressure.
And the scariest thing for Spurs fans may not be whether or not Postecoglou can or should survive it, but whether it makes a blind bit of difference either way.
