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It is the biggest game of the Premier League season. Arsenal’s last chance to revive a brilliant campaign in danger of spluttering to a halt before the finish line, Manchester City seemingly in position to grab a third straight English crown and a fifth under Pep Guardiola. Is there anything an injury-addled Arsenal can do to slow City’s march to the crown. Let’s look at some of the key issues going into the game:
Holding holds his own but midfield runners cause chaos
How different might this title race be if William Saliba were fit? Arsenal’s defensive issues predate the potentially season-ending back injury that the Frenchman suffered last month, but they certainly have gotten worse without a player who has looked more like prime Virgil van Dijk this season than Van Dijk himself. Like the great Liverpool defender, Saliba radiates that magisterial energy of a man who knows he is going to chase down every long ball, win every duel. That’s true even when he doesn’t. It would be true even against Erling Haaland.
Of course Rob Holding cannot live up to those standards, no one would expect perhaps their fourth or fifth choice center back to do so. The issue that, even at his best, the 27 year old brings with him all sorts of complicating factors that inhibit what those around him can do. Saliba’s partnership with Gabriel Magalhaes suited the needs of both, the latter a more aggressive defender who wanted to take opponents out of the contest high up the pitch. Holding wants to do the same and has nowhere near the recovery pace required to maintain the ultra-high line that Arsenal have defended in for most of the season. His distribution is also inferior, and it was notable against Southampton that Thomas Partey was often collecting the ball level with the center backs, acres of space between him and the attack that he usually links up with.
What Holding can do well is win his duels and it was perhaps overstated just how much he struggled on the last occasion he ran into Haaland. The yellow card he picked up in the first half meant it was the logical decision for Arteta to withdraw a player who had not started a Premier League game before the FA Cup fourth round tie at the Etihad. He had a way of approaching the best striker in the world, not one without risks, but the best way for him to approach this toughest of tasks. In both games this season, City have played long to negate Arsenal’s press. That has meant hitting Haaland, who in turn found himself smothered by Holding.
Wyscout/FA
The image above was their first battle at the Etihad in January and it set the tone for what was to follow. Oftentimes it worked out Arsenal’s way, Holding winning the aerial duel or putting enough pressure on the ball that it squirmed loose to a covering team mate. The one time Haaland got the ball down and managed to turn, Holding had no choice but to give away a yellow card and find himself on a booking, but there is no risk free way for anyone, even Saliba, to defend against City’s No.9.
It could well be so much harder for Holding this time around. This time there are no guarantees that Haaland will be as isolated up top as he was on this occasion, and indeed often in the early part of the season. Below, for instance, is an occasion where the Norwegian does win the knockdown but his team mates are so far behind that Arsenal can just swarm him and reclaim possession.
Wyscout/FA
Since January, and indeed even since these two last met in the league, Guardiola’s system has adapted to the extent that John Stones functions as a second midfielder alongside Rodri. That has given the likes of Ilkay Gundogan, Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva license to push up alongside Haaland, even if that is usually not to win the knockdowns from long balls. Immediately Holding’s task becomes harder and though he might be able to win his fair share of aerial duels, it is going to be a far tougher task to stop Haaland if City are picking up a more sizeable share of second balls.
Guardiola manages to slow one of Arsenal’s wide wonders
One of the challenges with writing these columns is the sheer impossibility of figuring out what it is that Guardiola is going to do before he does it. Arteta acknowledged as much in his pre-match press conference, listing out half a dozen ways in which City could tinker with their approach to test Arsenal. “They play with a box inside, they can play with a diamond, they can build the game with three, they can be asymmetric on one side, they can play Bernardo on the right and play with a diamond with Walker higher. They can do so many things that you have to be adaptable and focus on certain principles to take the game where you want it.”
To which the question must be, well you are the former City assistant manager, don’t you have a sense of what they’re going to do? “The answer is no,” he told CBS Sports. “I don’t know the lineup. Once we have the lineup we’ll have more of a rough idea but it depends who he plays, they can do something different… like we can.” Arteta hinted again that he might try a different approach in the last sentence of his press conference but for all the questions there are a few things we know for sure. Arsenal’s great strength is in their wide forwards. City might only have the means to stop one of them.
On the Arsenal left, Gabriel Martinelli has been in electric form since the World Cup and is currently in the Premier League’s top five scorers on 15 goals. Against Southampton in particular he seemed to be the only one who refused to concede defeat after a disastrous start, showing a will to win that drove his teammates onwards.
Twenty3
Still, if you were designing a defender to deal with Martinelli you might end up with someone who looks like Kyle Walker: athletic, experienced and utterly fearless. The England international has not been playing much in recent weeks with Guardiola favoring center backs out on the flanks. One suspects that might change in light of issues on the other flank, where Nathan Ake’s involvement is a matter of some doubt after he injured himself against a Bayern Munich side who had quite a lot of joy attacking City from wide areas.
Ake has done as well as anyone this season in slowing Bukayo Saka’s path towards goal. Without him, or even with a less than fully fit version of him, there may not be all that much City can do to stop one of the Premier League’s best attackers getting joy down the right. Aymeric Laporte seems the natural option but he is another center back, one with precious little experience in this particular role. That aside it really is just Sergio Gomez, a raw young winger who is scarcely an adequate replacement for one of Oleksandr Zinchenko and Joao Cancelo, let alone both. Jack Grealish can be as diligent as possible, but even two on one matchups don’t faze Saka anymore. For all the understandable concern about how Arsenal will line up at the back, City have their own issues that have no obvious solution.
City win the title race… but Arsenal will be back
The possibility of Arsenal winning at the Etihad and breaking an 11 game Premier League losing streak is not remotely beyond the imagination. They might have been beaten in both meetings with Manchester City this season but there has been at least as much of each game in which Mikel Arteta’s side have been in the ascendancy. The title holders might have hit the hottest of streaks since the first blushes of spring, but Bayern Munich proved in the second leg of their Champions League quarterfinal that their flanks can be exploited by elite wide talent.
With a win, Arsenal would rip to shreds the perceived narrative of this title race, right? Suddenly they would be the masters of their own destiny, the clear favorites to clinch a first domestic crown in 19 years. Opta gives City a 91 percent chance of winning the league with a win and 72 percent with a draw. Lose and Arsenal become the favored side by a margin of 56 percent to 44. And yet while the models might like the look of a visitor that emerges victorious on Wednesday it is hard to see Arteta’s players negotiating the trickiest clashes ahead of them — away to Newcastle, at home to Brighton — while retaining any lead they might have over a City side whose fixture list looks rather more favorable now that Brentford seem to be playing in their flip flops and beach shorts.
However Arsenal lose it, along will come the spurious talk of bottling it while finishing around 90 points, the suggestion that this was their last chance because, as the familiar cliche goes, everyone else will get better next season. Manchester United will sign another superstar in their late 20s with a history of missing games, Liverpool’s rebuild will begin, Chelsea will be less of a situational comedy, Newcastle will have Saudi money burning a hole in their pocket. All this may be true, and yet. It does Arsenal a real disservice to suggest they are anything other than City’s most logical rival over the years ahead of them.
After all, part of the reason that their title bid was questioned for so long was the relative youth of their squad. It seemed fanciful earlier in the season that all of Arteta’s bright young things had made the leap at once, but performances have now held for long enough to make that theory rather more convincing. If there is room for the likes of Saka, Martinelli and Saliba to grow then there is time too. Then there will be the strengthening Arsenal do in the transfer market, where they are looking for two authoritative midfielders — players on their radar include Declan Rice, Moises Caicedo, Mason Mount, Gabri Viega and — and a full back. If they can have comparable depth across the rest of the pitch to that which they have in attack, where they survived Gabriel Jesus’ injury rather impressively, then they should be able to compete on multiple fronts.
Of course, being City’s nearest rival does not come with guaranteed silverware. Liverpool can attest to the relative scarcity of trophies when you are the continent’s second best team behind Guardiola’s. Arsenal, however, have positioned themselves much as Jurgen Klopp did, as the side most ready to pounce on any off years at the Etihad. All they can do is hope they eventually come.
