If you’re a follower of the expected goals metric, known to most as xG, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Arsenal generated enough chances to score more than three goals last night.
It’s not a measurement to everybody’s taste, I understand that, but it is a useful way of judging the quality of chances a team has created, even if it often has little bearing on the final score.
Newcastle by contrast, generated about 1.5xG. Taken together, it pretty much tells you the story of the match and perhaps even the story of Arsenal’s season.
The Magpies created two big chances and they buried them both. Arsenal created half a dozen and missed every single one. The difference between the sides? A striker who can kill you with half a chance.
Alexander Isak was quietly brilliant again last night. He’s a man in red hot form at the moment and was once again so at the Emirates. He doesn’t need half a dozen chances to score, he doesn’t need it on a plate, he doesn’t need 50 passes from front to back. Isak is the kind of striker who can change games even when there’s precious little going on around him.
He can turn a half chance, even a quarter chance, into a goal. It doesn’t matter if it’s against the run of play, it doesn’t matter if there’s luck involved, he buries it all the same. That’s 14 goals in 15 games for him now and he had a big hand in both goals at the Emirates too.
At the other end, we again had to watch Arsenal toil, toil and toil some more in front of goal. As has been the case for weeks, they either score three or they score none. Last night, it was none. Open goals, one-on-ones, free headers, we conspired to miss them all when it genuinely looked harder to do so. It would have been comical had it not been so insanely frustrating.
But there should be no surprises here. The club has known and even made public after the defeat to Bayern Munich last year that there was something missing in our attack, ‘an X factor’ they were quoted as saying. Despite that, when the opportunity came to bring some new attacking options in during the summer, the Gunners opted for a duel-winning midfielder, a left back, and a right-winger the manager doesn’t rate enough to even play. With the departures of Emile Smith Rowe, Reiss Nelson and Fabio Vieira, you might even argue the situation is worse now than it was back then.
I have a lot of sympathy for Mikel Arteta. He has set up and coached his teams into commanding positions time and again this season and they have let him down in the key moments. In the last six weeks especially, we have seen some shocking misses.
But that sympathy stops when you realise Arteta had the power to change it. He could and should have prioritised forward players but, for whatever reason, he failed to do so together with Edu and we are now reaping what has been sown. We could only cast envious glances across to the Newcastle bench to see what might have been in Isak, the type of player who would likely have scored a hat-trick for us last night.
If the urgency of our situation was lacking clarity last night, there can be no doubt now. Perhaps that’s the positive to come from all of this. Our attacking shortcomings are glaringly obvious and Bukayo Saka can’t paper over them any longer. We need urgent action this month or we face more scenarios like Newcastle, like Fulham, like Everton, where if a team digs in a rides its luck, it gets the rewards.
The clock is ticking not only on this transfer window but on the trajectory of our season.
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