What a weekend! Europe’s top leagues delivered again with a ton of talking points to dissect now that the dust has settled. Conceding a late equalizer will hurt in the table, but it’s clear Mikel Arteta & Co. emerged with a moral and psychological victory from Sunday’s trip to Manchester City.
Meanwhile, Christian Pulisic scored early as Milan won a typically feisty derby over Serie A champs Inter, and relieved some of the pressure on Rossoneri boss Paulo Fonseca. Elsewhere, Barcelona surged to another win in LaLiga, but must do without elite goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen after what looks to be a serious injury. Can they sustain this pace without him?
There were also talking points galore for Stuttgart (who beat Borussia Dortmund), Man United (who didn’t beat Crystal Palace), Liverpool (who got a goal from Darwin Núñez), and Chelsea (who are getting the best from Nico Jackson), and much, much more.
It’s Monday, and there’s a lot to unpack. There’s a performance dimension to games like this, and there’s a result dimension. Sometimes they match, sometimes they don’t. And while Manchester City and Arsenal end up drawing 2-2 on Sunday, there is little doubt who emerges with more bounce in their step: it’s Mikel Arteta.
There’s the obvious point that an away draw against probably the best team in the world (and certainly the best in the country) is a huge boost. There’s the resilience shown playing for 45 minutes a man down and only conceding at the very end. And there’s the fact that you did it without arguably your most important midfield piece, Martin Odegaard.
Conversely, if you’re Pep Guardiola you’ll wake up grumpy. Sure, you’re still top of the Premier League, but so what? Your title rivals got the psychological lift, and you lost Rodri to injury too. You conceded one goal in part because your captain switched off, and another because your set-piece defending wasn’t up to scratch.
Those 28 shots you took in the second half — 20 of them with an xG of 0.04 or less — were an exercise in repetition and futility, which is exactly what you don’t expect from a Guardiola side. And while hindsight is always 20/20, you might even come to the conclusion that you would have been better off if Leandro Trossard had not been sent off.
OK, that last one may be a bit of a stretch, but what’s evident is how much of an impact that second yellow in first-half injury time had on the game. Arsenal opted to retrench, taking off Bukayo Saka for Ben White, turning Gabriel Martinelli into an auxiliary fullback and turning to a de facto 6-3-0 formation. City didn’t react with a change until 20 minutes — and 13 fruitless shots — later, when Phil Foden came on.
We ended up with a weird siege, which was long on drama but short on, well, football. Arsenal stayed so compact that City couldn’t make the extra man count. Not in terms of finding one-twos in tight spaces, not in terms of delivering effective crosses (bar on one or two occasions that Erling Haaland could convert), not in terms of dragging Arsenal out of position.
At the risk of sounding blasphemous, that was disappointing from Guardiola. Nobody is arguing with changes for changes’ sake, but surely City are not at their best when Rúben Dias, Manuel Akanji, Kyle Walker and Josko Gvardiol end up taking 12 shots on goal in the second half, almost all of them long-distance prayers where you’re hoping for a lucky deflection.
You can argue that, eventually, it worked. Jack Grealish may have come on late, but he did come on and played a big part in John Stones’ late equalizer. Sure, but that’s no game plan — that’s throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. And it was genuinely surprising to see City like that, just as it was surprising seeing the defending for the Gabriel goal (and the header, a few minutes earlier, that should have been a goal).
You just saw him score a very similar goal against Spurs in the North London derby. Why defend like that? And I don’t just mean putting Jérémy Doku or Kyle Walker on him to impede his run (which didn’t work) but not reacting to the overload on the far post?
If Guardiola has plenty to work on — two straight home games in all competitions without a win is something that hadn’t happened since 2023 — so too does Arteta. It’s just that, until Odegaard (or, at least, Mikel Merino) returns there’s not much he can do. Arsenal are built around one of those two being on the pitch, if only because there’s nobody else who can do what they do.
What’s next for Fonseca? If you’re a cynic, you’ll point out that it’s one thing to pull this formation out of a hat in a derby — where everybody is excited anyway and runs twice as hard — and quite another to get it done on a regular basis. It’s true that a 4-2-4 likely won’t be Milan’s base formation going forward — he’ll have to come up with something more rational — but what it shows is that reports of internal turmoil likely were exaggerated.
And the players believe in him enough to listen and do what he asks them to do, with full conviction. For a new manager, that’s already a big win.
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