Arsenal were unable to find much in front of goal today as Brentford held on for a 1-1 draw.
The Gunners started brightly, but were unable to make their dominance pay early on. Despite building up plenty of pressure, David Raya was hardly tested in the Bees goal, and the rare opportunities up the other end were the more dangerous.
Ivan Toney did have the ball in the back of the net, only to have it ruled out for a foul in the build-up, while we continued to put our efforts over or wide of the goalposts. Toney had the best chance of the half later on in the opening 45, when he smashed his effort off the crossbar, and we ultimately ended up happy to go into the break level.
On the hourmark Arteta finally made his first change, bringing off Gabriel Martinelli for new signing Leandro Trossard, and it didn’t take long for that to pay off. The substitute found the net just minutes after coming on, closing out a team move from close range.
Just as we were looking like we were going to make our dominance pay, we found ourselves back level. Ivan Toney made us pay for failing to clear the ball from our area, and we were left with 15 minutes to find a winner, despite VAR having a close look at a possible offside.
There was very little excitement to enjoy after that unfortunately, while the game threatened to be marred by a late altercation deep into injury time after a dire tackle of Oleksandr Zinchenko, but it just wasn’t to be.
Do we now have to consider ourselves in our seasonal blip? Does this result make our next league game all the more important?
Patrick