Good morning, everyone! It’s an early tee time for Andrew this morning, so I’m filling in for the day. Well, I’m trying to – my daughter’s trying to help and, to be completely honest with you, it’s not that helpful.
Anyway, she’s off to nursery now so I’ll be able to sink my teeth into something.
A week without an Arsenal game feels strange now, doesn’t it? We’re 55 games into this season, and 23 of those have been played on a weekday, and that’s without us being selected for Monday Night Football once.
After all that, a week without a fixture feels like a real luxury as well as a really, really long time. The cycle of having a fallout from a game, then the lead into the next one, means we’re constantly judging things on the fly, before changing those judgements on the fly as situations change and new bits of evidence present themselves.
No matter how you felt at full-time on Sunday, one thing is clear almost one week on: Arsenal need to win their games.
But you can’t win them all at once. So really, right now, Arsenal just have to beat Newcastle tomorrow.
Yet as much as I really would like to take that big picture view, I can’t help but think about the smaller things. The smaller things that could become huge things. Like goal difference.
City may have beaten Burnley to go top on Wednesday but it felt like a let-off. With the teams level on points, I feared the additional blow of City racking up the goals and all but taking the prospect of Arsenal pipping them on goal difference off the table. Thanks to some missed chances, they only won 1-0, and it means with five games to go, the table looks like this:
Manchester City – 33 played, 21 wins, 70 PTS, +63 GD
Arsenal – 33 played, 21 wins, 70 PTS, +37 GD
The teams are currently separated by goals scored.
After Sunday’s game, Mikel Arteta referred to a “new league”, and that’s even truer now than it was when he said it. We start from scratch. It’s a race to the finish line and City passed up the opportunity to give themselves a headstart.
With goal difference even and a real possibility that it ends up deciding the title – remember, it doesn’t require both teams to win all their games, just to drop the same number of points from here on in – I’ve seen some chat outside of Arsenal circles about whether Arsenal need to change their style to really maximise their goal difference.
Here’s your reminder that, 33 games in, Arsenal and City do have the same goal difference.
And that isn’t because of Arsenal’s defensive solidity earlier in the season either. Across the last 10 played in the league only, Arsenal’s goal difference is actually one better than City’s.
Since Christmas, City have won by more than one goal three times in the league (Arsenal have done so five times) and just once since Valentine’s Day.
The idea that they keep blowing teams away and that Arsenal need to crank up the attacking effort to keep up with them doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.
Not that I don’t think we could see a different Arsenal over the next few weeks. As Tim’s column this week pointed out, Arsenal have played the way they have with what they have. And what they have now is different. Martin Odegaard is back, Kai Havertz is back, Bukayo Saka may return before long. The three haven’t started a game together since 2024. They’ve never started a game together with Eberechi Eze also in the team.
Last weekend offered some glimpses of what we could see with three of those players on the pitch together and I’m hoping for more over the coming weeks, especially with three home games to play and not a single game against a team in the top half remaining.
With an attack that gels better, Arsenal should spend more time in the opposition half. That means more chances, more set pieces, but also less time defending our own box. Win-win.
Arsenal need to win, yes, but we’re at a point now where winning by a good margin could be truly significant. It’d help the league table, it’d help Arteta rotate a bit more easily in the latter stages of games, and it’d offer a platform for Viktor Gyokeres to contribute in more favourable conditions.
So far this season, Arsenal have scored just six goals in the opening 15 minutes of Premier League games. It’s a pretty average return: five teams have more, five teams have the same. Last season was similar but the two seasons before that saw Arsenal lead the league with 12 (2023-24) and 13 (2022-23) strikes in the opening quarter of an hour of games.
I’d love to see a ‘start fast, rest later’ approach from here.
I doubt whether the likes of Havertz and Odegaard can consistently play 90 minutes in games after the seasons they’ve had, especially with Champions League fixtures squeezed into upcoming midweeks, and Arteta has often referred to a winning game state being one that is more suited to Gyokeres. The Swede has one open-play goal in the first half of a league game all season. In 2026, he has scored five goals as a sub (a goal every 38.4 minutes) compared to five (one every 269.6 minutes) as a starter.
His penalty against Bournemouth two weeks ago is his only goal in eight Arsenal starts since the brace against Tottenham in February. We’d all hoped that performance and those goals would kickstart something, but that hasn’t materialised.
It may not have been with Eze, but we have also seen Arteta use wide players tucking in to provide a sort of ‘two tens’ shape earlier this season and that’s the perfect way to get him and Odegaard on the pitch together.
New combinations, new options, and hopefully some new energy for this new league. Starting tomorrow, let’s have at it.
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It seems Newcastle will be without Tino Livramento and Anthony Gordon. There will be coverage of today’s press conference over on arseblog.news later today and Andrew will be back on these pages tomorrow morning ahead of the game.
I’ll be joining Andrew on Patreon for a Newcastle preview podcast later this afternoon as well. Until then, you’ve still got plenty of time to listen to yesterday’s arsecast with Stadio’s Ryan Hunn if you haven’t already.
Have a good Friday!
