Perhaps in years to come, those present at the Etihad Stadium for that long slog during which football was re-imagined as a complex and permanent Sunday hangover will say that I was there when Manchester City failed to score at home for the first time in 58 games. .
What to say about a game that isn’t actually a game, that decides little beyond keeping the Premier League title race still hopefully open? What happened here?
Relating to: Arsenal leave Liverpool with title advantage by retaining Manchester City
The first half of this 0-0 draw was like watching someone take a senior engineering exam. Complex, unknown things seemed to be happening. No doubt there is deep data analysis to be done on those 45 minutes of feint and counter-feint, the phantom pressure from Bernardo Silva, the almost total lack of involvement from Erling Haaland prowling the edges of the afternoon. His nephew was forced to wander around an art gallery.
A few things happened. Perhaps most notable was Arsenal’s set-piece coach, Nicolas Jover, jumping to his feet every time his team won or conceded a corner, replacing Mikel Arteta in the manager’s crow’s nest, pointing and whistling, frowning sagely like no other . Deep delivery into the arms of Stefan Ortega. Logically it kind of makes sense. But this really needs to stop.
There were brief sparks of freedom. With 76 minutes left, Kevin De Bruyne quickly crossed from the left wing and tried to make the football happen by bouncing Thomas Partey. He found Jérémy Doku in the middle, who stopped, clanged, then struck oddly high and wide, like a man hitting an empty tin can with his square-toed shoe.
Meanwhile, it was new and even quite refreshing to see a football match so devoid of content. City had 75% of the ball in the first half and had total domination of the area, but only had one shot on target. Approximately 56 tackles were attempted in this game. There were 28 permits.
At the end of this, Arsenal will probably be the happiest of the two teams, although not as much as Liverpool, who won earlier in the day. Arsenal wanted at least 0-0. And they got one, a grueling, grueling 0-0 that still felt like a slight missed opportunity. Did Arsenal miss a trick here?
Arteta later insisted it was “an exciting game and a good result”. Really? The first of these may be true in a tactical ultra-purist sense. The latter is debatable. The final decision on the crafty, low-key, low-block spot at the Etihad Stadium will, as always, be results-driven and determined by what happens elsewhere on other afternoons.
However, Arsenal’s chances of winning at home to City probably won’t be great either. And here they played a different game than the one that had brought all those victories since the dawn of the winter sun. Arsenal’s greatest asset is intensity, what L’Equipe calls “controlled enthusiasm”. This involved starting fast, striking opponents directly with red lightning; the press led with a Martin Ødegaard kind of frenzy. Did they have the courage to do this here?
That would be a no. City lined up with a muscular blue wall of six defenders. They pressed Arsenal from the first minutes, destroyed the center of the pitch, took all the air out of the field. There were clashes and tense nerves, ruminative 27-pass movements. It was a feeling of complete suffocation, pillow to face football. City had control but nothing more. This wasn’t an end-to-end thing. This was one last thing.
After the hour went by, Pep Guardiola at least tried to change that setup by sending on Doku and Jack Grealish. There were frantic footsteps coming from Doku. De Bruyne attacked a little harder.
In the middle of this stretch, Haaland had a pointless game rather than a terrible game like he had a few times against better teams. At first it went deeper; Once the ball was in he went into galloping areas where he was frankly irresistible.
-
Download the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhone or the Google Play store on Android by searching for ‘The Guardian’.
-
If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the latest version.
-
In the Guardian app, tap the Menu button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (gear icon) and then Notifications.
-
Turn on sports notifications.
Then he stopped doing that, because the afternoons became one of those games where, instead of being, say, the best footballer in the world, he barely looked like a footballer at all. He was said to have solved the problems created by Cristiano Ronaldo at Juventus. Haaland didn’t do that here. On days like these, it’s a bit like playing with a self-imposed obstacle.
Declan Rice had a solid game for Arsenal. Ødegaard was probably the star’s turn. He is a strange player, a mixture of fierce and relentless pressing and beautifully refined possession skills, like the hypertechnical James Milner. He fought hard, pressed and fouled, and gave a bespoke performance.
City had control but no incisions to capitalize on it. Arsenal had enough kills to leave them with a chance of winning the game. Will they regret not going to Arsenal here, not focusing more on attack, not showing their last fire? Arteta will hope he doesn’t and will spin it as another obstacle being overcome. One thing seems certain. This will now run to the end.