How Arsenal away are so different from Arsenal at home

By Tony Attwood

Given that the first Arsenal game in this season’s Champions League is away I thought it was worth reflecting on Arsenal’s away record last season.  Arsenal won 13, dreew three and lost three.  Not quite as good as the home record but still better than the home record of most clubs in the Premier League.

In effect only two Premier League clubs last season had home records better than Arsenal’s away record: ManC and Liverpool.  Which makes Arsenal away look like rather a difficult club for the club playing their normal home game to get hold of. 

Indeed as one ofr two of the newspapers have realised, Arsenal’s 1-0 win over the tiny totts was their 10th Premier League away win of 2024.  This might not sound that  amazing until you remember that  Arsenal has only played 11 games away from home so far this calendar year.

But that statistic appears to be as nothing when taken in comparison of the fact that in these games Arsenal have scored 31 goals.   And also Arsenal have not once gone behind.  It does all seem to be part of the general process of adapting to each environment in which the club plays.

Wenger of course was the man who perfected the notion of playing away, and threw clubs into consternation when they sent their spies to watch the Arsenal home game before playing Arsenal at their own ground, only to find that they were in that home game, facing a totally different formation and style of play.  Arteta obviously took this in when studying how to run games both as a player at Arsenal and later at ManC.

Sky Sports, Gary Neville however couldn’t really give Arsenal credit – so he had to go back to the 1-0  to the Arsenal days, but of course there is no comparison between this team, and what has gone before.  Far from being 1-0 to the Arsenal we have had the 6-0 win over West Ham, 5-0 over Burnley, 6-0 over Sheffield United (that’s the one where the crowd walked out after ten minutes) and games against Brighton, Wolverhampton and Tottenham where three goals were scored.

Of course with no Rice, Odegaard or Merino Arsenal could not do the same thing at the weekend, but unless we have this wrong about Rice being able to play in Europe, this now changes things slightly.

Also what we saw in the last league game seemed to be a rejuvenated Martinelli and if he follows the path of getting better with each game, the game in Italy is going to be perfect for him.

In fact what Arssenal are doing is two things: adapting to each different opponent and having a different home and away strategy as well.  It makes it quite hard for the opposition to work out how Arsenal are going to play, not least because Arsenal will have had a team watching the opposition both live in the stadia, and on video.

Given that Arsenal now also have a set of players who can be both instinctive and who will follow orders makes it very hard for the opposition to have any idea who is going to do what.

And there is this issue we have already alluded to, of the excellent away record of the club, which surely must start worrying teams who consider setting out to play their normal game at home, and then suddenly start wondering what they ought to do to avoid a heavy defeat.

But this is another game in the difficult run which the press have been talking about so much, and which ends with the game against Manchester United.   After which the away games look much more winnable including as they do Bournemouth, West Ham, Fullahm, Palace and Brentford.

I fancy rather a fine win to kick off the European “look we can play lots more games no matter what the players say” campaign