With Saka out for a couple of months can Arsenal retain momentum, or is the League just ludicrous?

 

 

• Arsenal injuries, and the referee who never oversees a home win!!!
• Has Saka been overplayed or is he just indispensible like other world class players?

By Tony Attwood

We all know that life on the pitch for Arsenal is going to be more difficult without Saka, but do Arsenal have enough to get through this time without him and yet still win matches?

Watching the match in the ground last night the answer came back…. well maybe but it is going to need some practice.  And perhaps some different tactics.  Although at least we won’t always have the referee who doesn’t allow the home team to win.

For the fact is that even when he is not touching the ball, if Saka is playing that means he is distracting the opposition who are always looking to see what he is up to, and wondering what he will do next.   And as last night confirmed (as if it needed confirming) we don’t have another Saka.

Of course, we still have lots of attributes in the team – not least Raya who has apparently now kept 23 clean sheets in 50 games, which is a pretty extraordinary record.

And there are things that Arsenal do have which other clubs don’t have, such as an unbeaten home record.  And a set of results in the last seven league games that is the envy of the rest, as it includes five wins, two draws, 17 goals scored and three conceded, which seems a rather good record to me.  That gives a goal difference across the last ten of +14.

In fact across the last seven league matches Liverpool have the self-same record of five wins and two draws.  But they have scored 21 goals and conceded 11.  That is a goal difference across the last seven of +10.

So on that rather arbitrary notion of just selecting the last seven games played Arsenal are doing marginally better – although I have to admit it didn’t look like it last night, despite the win.   So maybe we can argue that Arsenal have to get used to playing without Saka, and this was the first practice warmup.

But what we should also remember here is that this is Arsenal’s second spell without a key player – and we all know that life without Martin Ødegaard proved to be problematic.   And there things did not work out so well during the seven games he missed.   In that case Arsenal won three out of seven. 

But this is going to be known as Sala’s injury season in which he has already lost between 10 Octboer and 18 November, 39 days.  During that spell Arsenal lost to Bournemouth, drew with Liverpool, lost to Newcastle and drew with Chelsea.  So we know this is going to be very tough.

The problem is of course if we had a backup to Saka, he would not be happy sitting on the bench all the time waiting for Saka to be injured, so some re-shuffling has to be done.  And there is the winter transfer window which will give Arsenal the chance to buy if they feel they need to, in order to get through this problem,

And there is the fact, rather reassuringly, that we won’t face Ipwich again – a team that started with five at the back and five in midfield, with one midfielder becoming the attack when the ball came forward.   

Indeed it is worth looking at the possession figures.   After 27 minutes, Arsenal had had 92% of it while the entire Ipswich team seemed to know more about time-wasting than the rest of the league put together.  In fact  Arijanet Muric must have known what we all thought of his performance in goal when he started feeling the wrath of the crowd after just 20 minutes for time-wasting.

Time wasting on 20 minutes?  This is getting ridiculous.  But then when the opposition has not been defeated in the last 41 league games at home I suppose you have to do something to annoy them and hope they will lose their focus.  Certainly from my seat it looked like Ipswich were playing from the off for a goalless draw.

But although the memory of the match is very negative the fact is that this is 13 league home games in succession that Arsenal have won, and that is title-winning form, as is 42 home games undefeated

And the game once again does raise the question of the distance between the Premier League and the Championship.  The League table shows that the bottom three clubs are the three that came up last season.  Between them they have won six games out of 54, which is 11%. 

Last season the bottom three won 14 games all season which was 12%,   The gap between the league is now so enormous that it is getting ludicrous.  But at least Arsenal overcame the referee who had not previously this season overseen a single match in which the home team won.  It took some doing, but we got there.