There’s no denying Saturday’s defeat at lowly Everton was as foreseeable as it was irritating…but it could have been a lot worse.
We could have been sat here this Monday morning looking at a mere two-point lead in the Premier League and the looming prospect of Manchester City breathing uncomfortably down our necks.
Because of an unfathomably rare and timely Tottenham win, however, our five-point lead remains in tact and it may yet even stretch to eight points again if we can dust ourselves down and get swiftly back to business.
By any measure, it was a poor weekend for Mikel Arteta’s men but some of the gloom was lifted by an decidedly tame defeat for City at Spurs – a performance not many of us would have predicted. With the scent of blood in their nostrils, there aren’t too many better than City, so the timidity of their performance was all the more surprising.
For an Arsenal perspective, it was a joy to witness another stodgy performance from our main rivals – long may they continue. The City sides of the last five years or so have made relentlessness their trademark so for them to have stuttered at such a key juncture felt amazing.
There is still a long way to go this season, however, and two fixtures against City yet to face so there is no use getting carried away – and hardly any of us are – but there is no denying the boon delivered in a potentially pivotal weekend for our season.
Defeats have been a rare thing for Arsenal this season so it felt doubly-painful when the final whistle blew at Goodison Park on Saturday. Sean Dyche is a blunt tool fit for one purpose, a purpose we all know and can see coming a mile off, and yet so often it proves effective.
I wrote in the build-up to this fixture about how, played even a week earlier, this game would likely have been a processional victory for the Gunners, with Everton floundering and weak under the leadership of the helpless Frank Lampard. But we were on the wrong end of fate on this occasion and the decisive move from the Everton board to sack Lampard and appoint Dyche meant the entire dynamic of the match was changed.
That’s not to say we were powerless to resist, but it did hand the hosts an enormous, near-intangible advantage that is unique in football – the new manager bounce. They had energy, desire, and motivation that simply didn’t exist a week previously and a tactical plan that had the sort of structure and coherence that was absent under Lampard.
Buoyed also by a newly-expectant home support, this was clearly a bad time to be travelling to Goodison and we quickly found ourselves sucked into playing the sort of game that suited the hosts to a tee. Our quality and pace deserted us, and were denied us in fairness, and we ended up attempting to trade blows with a side whose game is built on blood and guts.
If you don’t start fast against a Dyche side, your task only gets harder as the game wears on and so it proved for us as we toiled, huffed and puffed throughout. What chances we did fashion were fleeting and, in truth, of a lower quality than we are used to. Both Eddie Nketiah and Bukayo Saka might feel they could have done better with the first-half opportunities that came their way but there really wasn’t a great deal more to get excited about.
Dyche set his side up to pack 11 men into the centre of the pitch and double-up in the wide areas where possible. They spent 90-odd minutes doing precisely that and, for the most part, it worked. We might lament not making more of long diagonal balls that were on throughout the match but hindsight is always 20/20. We simply didn’t have the answer to Everton’s approach.
That it was two former Burnley players involved in the set-piece goal added a bitter irony to the defeat. For all the time and tide that has passed since the peak of Dyche’s reign at Turf Moor, his charges have come back to haunt us in the most Burnley way possible.
Though we’re unlikely in the extreme to have to face another side that will set up like Dyche did and does this season, there are elements that will appeal to the video analysts of the league. Packing the central areas and doubling-up on our wingers certainly had a dampening effect on our game, though it obviously comes at a cost to your own attacking intent as a team.
If such tactics are seen to succeed, it won’t comes a surprise to see them employed again, especially on the road, in what remains of this season. We will need to be wise to it, and have a response if one is required, because we can’t allow ourselves to be smothered so easily.
For now, though, we can consider this our ‘get out of jail free’ card well and truly played. We may have stumbled, but City’s defeat meant we caught ourselves before a fall. Let’s take that blessing and move on quickly!
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