Many would have claimed its too early to truly matter but i strongly disagree, Johnny stones saved us from a catastrophe there. I know its early season but them winning here with 10 men, going above us and with 3 of their 4 hardest games of the season behind them already, That's a boost even the biggest bottle jobs in premier league history would have to work especially hard to screw up. That's still 2 points dropped for us but we avoided a disaster at least.
Despite being 2-1 down i think we had a pretty good first half in the main after a brilliant start but after Rodri going off it was slowly slipping arsenals way as the game went on until the red.
Really disappointing second half. We had no idea what to do. Spent 50 minutes passing side to side and doing virtually nothing else. At some point somebody has got to do something, be it getting our players capable of hitting it from the edge of the box in prime shooting position, getting some aerial support in the box for haaland and have them attack crosses or getting down the outside and whipping low crosses in which can bounce anywhere and get you a goal from any of the 15 men in the box, just something other than side to side passing. The likelihood of something coming off over the course of 50 minutes of sustained pressure is infinitely better than passing it side to side for that long hoping for a big mistake and offering no real threat.
I don't think they defended amazingly well, much like inter, they just had to do their job and stay alert, we didn't pose many questions for them to answer and that's something we have to rectify, we have to come up with ways of consistently creating chances for Haaland. He looked bang up for it and we failed to get him involved.
Oliver handled that game very poorly, I'm not one for moaning about every single decision that doesn't favour us, there were questionable decisions throughout but ive no real issue with his decisions in thr main but his inability to prevent them from obvious shithousery every other minute was just a piss take. Then to compound that piss take, how was there only 7 minutes of added time? I was genuinely expecting more than double that and even that was being conservative. Just 2 of the dozens of occasions they feigned injury in the second half, the one where they had a team talk and the one a few minutes after, I counted 8 minutes the game was stopped for those 2 alone, add in all the other times, the persistent time wasting for every set piece and the subs and you should genuinely have been looking at closer to the 20 minute mark and a record amount of extra time. Would love to see the stats for how long the game was live in that second half.
They played like a £700m version of Tony Pulis' Stoke. It was an embarrassing game for suppsedly the two best teams in the country. I despise the dippers more than any other team but they at least always had a go and had to respect that. We went at it toe-to-toe, they approached games like wannabe champions and you got some of the highest quality games you'll ever witness. That doesnt even begin to compare to the games against this Arsenal side.
I completely get doing it when down to 10 men, needs must then but they were doing it for 45 minutes before that too. Truly disgraceful way to go about the game.
Their fans were equally disgraceful, again, Dippers are the worst fans around and even they weren't as despicable as that.
A disappointing day, they'll be much happier when the dust settles but we escape with minimal damage. Need to find a new gear quickly because its not enough.
The only catastrophe in that game would be Rodri's injury if it turned out to be very bad (ACL). With Rodri in the team we can win many games in a row (if necessary).
