Ireland’s many rugby haters enjoyed a moment of hilarity on Friday night, when Ireland winger James Lowe sent a fine long kick down the line and into touch, then followed it with a celebration so enthusiastic it appeared he had forgotten Ireland were 10 points down to the All Blacks with eight minutes left to play.
Irish rugby fans will never forget where they were when James Lowe kicked the ball down the line and out of play, was the general thrust of the mockery.
There was a moment a little bit like that in the Arsenal technical area in the 92nd minute at Stamford Bridge, when Mikel Arteta and Arsenal’s rising-star set-piece coach Nicolas Jover celebrated the winning of a corner with manly roars and high fives.
Yes, in both cases the action meant the team’s position had improved, but not really by enough to justify the celebratory reaction, which seemed more like a learned high-performance-mentality charade than a display of genuine emotion.
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A couple of minutes later Arteta was rolling on the grass clutching his head after seeing Leandro Trossard deflect a Jurrien Timber cross just out of the reach of Kai Havertz, who could otherwise have scored into an empty net with the last kick of the game. This time the emotional display looked genuine.
A 1-1 draw was another disappointing result for Arsenal, not least because it was the fourth time this season they have dropped points from a winning position: Brighton, Manchester City, Liverpool and now Chelsea have all recovered to draw games in which Arsenal had taken the lead. Eight points dropped from leading positions already. In all of last season they dropped nine; the previous season eight.
This new susceptibility to equalisers hits Arsenal particularly hard as they have recently become the kind of team for whom holding on to the lead when you have it is an overriding imperative.
The change in emphasis was illustrated by the way Arsenal approached a corner they won in the 63rd minute, three minutes after Gabriel Martinelli had given them the lead.
The match clock read 62:34 when Levi Colwill’s effort to challenge Bukayo Saka sent the ball out for a corner.
That action had taken place right beside the corner flag – conveniently located for Saka, who takes Arsenal’s inswinging corners from that side, to retrieve the ball and get play restarted.
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In reality, knowing what he knew about Arsenal’s gamestate-dependent gameplan, this positioning actually presented a challenge for Saka, which he solved in the following way.
Rather than place the ball and prepare to deliver the cross, Saka turned away and set off on a slow, apparently absent-minded trudge towards the corner of Chelsea’s penalty area, while the big Arsenal defenders, Gabriel and William Saliba, rolled forward.
Some time later, when Arsenal had sufficiently infiltrated the Chelsea box. Saka turned around and trudged slowly, so slowly back towards the corner flag.
There was then a further delay as Gabriel and Neto got involved in some shoving at the edge of the area. When Saka eventually struck the ball towards the box the match clock read 63:40; 66 seconds had passed between the winning and the taking of the corner.
The average time for a corner to be taken in season 22-23 was 33 seconds, so to take twice that long was a remarkable feat which is testament to the influence of the Arteta-Jover nexus.
Obviously this wasn’t spontaneous – nothing about Arsenal these days is. But that still left open the question of what Arsenal were actually doing. Were they hoping to delay the corner so long that Chelsea’s defenders fell asleep, increasing the chances of scoring from the set-piece? Maybe, in that sense, this elaborate performance was a subtle attacking tactic.
But to most of the people in the stadium it looked and felt like the opposite. It looked like, just moments after taking the lead, and with half an hour still to play, Arsenal – boring Arsenal! – were already trying to kill the game.
Even if it was not defensive time-wasting – even if the delay was calculated set-piece science, an attempt to lull Chelsea into a mistake – it felt like the wrong option at that moment in the game. Chelsea had just conceded, their fans stunned, their heads maybe still spinning. Here Arsenal were giving them a breather, robbing themselves of the chance to keep the pressure on. The best way to defend a lead is to extend it.
Instead, 10 minutes later, Pedro Neto rifled an equaliser for Chelsea from 20 yards. Afterwards Arteta seemed to blame Martinelli for not getting closer to Neto, and indeed the Brazilian winger was substituted a minute after the goal.
The problem with Martinelli, though, is not really that he is not reliable enough when covering in defence. It’s that yesterday’s goal was just his third in 17 appearances this season.
Arsenal’s front three are simply not scoring enough goals. Havertz, Saka and Martinelli have contributed 13 goals in a combined 41 matches worth of playing time. Their equivalents at top-of-the-table Liverpool – Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz and Cody Gakpo – have scored 25 in a combined 34 matches. In other words, Liverpool’s attackers are scoring at more than twice the rate.
No wonder Arsenal have lately found themselves making such a cult of scoring from set pieces. Yet the set-piece worship feels like it is feeding back into the bigger problem of the team’s evident inhibition. There’s too much control, too much scripting, a team that was once eager and energetic now looks harried and stressed. Nobody ever won the Premier League without looking, at least some of the time, like they were having fun.
