Since Martin Odegaard was injured on international duty in September, Arsenal have struggled.
They have struggled to create chances, struggled to score goals and struggled to keep their opponent from scoring too. It’s been a perfect, crappy storm.
It’s difficult to say with certainty that our entire downturn in form and fortune is the result of the captain’s absence but the correlation is certainly compelling and difficult to ignore.
Our trip to Newcstle on Saturday was, in many ways, a microcosm of our last few months without Odegaard. It was dour, uninspired and lacking in the sort of urgency and aggression that became so potent a weapon for us in the Mikel Arteta era.
Clearly feeling like he lacks a natural replacement for his captain, Arteta has opted for a patchwork 4-4-2 with Trossard and Havertz nominally as a front two, trying to share the load in attack while contributing to the work Odegaard would do in midfield too.
It hasn’t worked.
For a long time, we got away with it because our set pieces produced the goods and Bukayo Saka kept producing sheer magnificence.
When we can’t rely on those, however, we’re coming up with precious little else and it’s really taking its toll.
In fairness to Saka, he did produce what should have been a game-saving piece of magic right at the death yesterday only to see his absolutely stunning cross tamely headed wide by Declan Rice with the entire goal open to him. It was a horrific miss by any measure and Saka was robbed of an another assist. But the point is this, we can’t keep just giving it to Saka and hoping for the best.
The manager has to find a way to re-balance his side in a way that gets us working as well as we do with Odegaard on the pitch. Trossard, for all his qualities, of which there are many, is rendered obsolete in the system as it is currently being used. He can’t contribute meaningful to either defence or attack and Havertz ahead of him has nothing to work with. Both of them are suffering.
Further back, we to continue to be sloppy and passive in possession, making us much easier to defend against than we should be. Newcastle, for instance, scored their goal in the opening 15 minutes and scarcely had a serious attack to deal with over the course of the next 80 minutes. You could make a case that Mikel Merino could/should have scored from close range and there’s no doubt Rice should have equalised late but, on the whole, it was no way near enough and it hasn’t been for a while.
The ‘muddling through’ method just hasn’t worked for Arteta and it’s time for a rethink before this season truly gets away from us.
As to the match itself, it wasn’t a great spectacle. We looked okay in the opening period of the game and, in truth, the hosts didn’t really cause us any defensive problems, but, once they’d scored the opening goal, they were only ever going to play one way. They managed, as they always do, to shut the game down as a serious spectacle after getting in front and we never had an answer to it. it was horrendous stuff.
But entertaining football is not Newcastle’s job, I get that. They wanted the three points above all else and did what they needed to do to secure them. That the referee indulged their antics is neither here nor there, we didn’t do enough to break them down or, at the very least, put ourselves in situations where could ask questions of their defence.
A few half-chances here and there isn’t going to cut it.
It was a deeply frustrating performance from a side badly struggling for form at the moment. The absence of Odegaard, while unfortunate, should not be so detrimental to how we are performing. It speaks of some poor decision-making by the manager and Edu in the summer. They took a chance by letting Emile Smith Rowe and Fabio Vieira leave and that gamble has failed.
Ethan Nwaneri is a tremendously talented young man but, if we’re turning to a 17-year-old and asking him to rescue us, there is something badly wrong.
The fruits of the summer’s transfer short-comings are starting to ripen.
We can only hope to see Odegaard back soon, and hope twice more that he stays fit for the remainder of the campaign because it seems clear to me that we are lost without him.
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