Arsenal repeat the same old mistakes to lose at Man United

Arsenal repeat same mistakes to lose at Old Trafford by Konstantin Mitov
Well lovely Arsenal people, our naivety cost us again. Sadly, I expected it. Unfortunately Mikel fell to the usual trap United set up for us again. What hurts is that again goals come more from our own mistakes than some brilliant football from them.
On their first goal Gabriel went for a challenge, didn’t get the ball, nor did he bring the man down, then Zinchenko went in the middle leaving Antony all alone.
On their second goal, Sambi gave a very dodgy ball that put them on the break, we again didn’t take the man down, one stupid ball through the middle and we went behind again.
On their third goal we were cut open by one pass again failing to take the man down. We should’ve done better but we lacked the experience. We should’ve addressed the midfield.
I’m really disappointed, because I expected it. I knew this would happen and I still went to watch it in a bar that was full of United fans by the time the game started… And we were playing well in the second half, but then conceded a stupid goal. I look at the bench and I’m worried. I think the 3 subs disrupted the balance of the team, it just hurts how easily we allowed their goals again.
Our game management was stupid. We should’ve be more smart and calm it down a little after our equaliser, instead we went gung ho and left ourselves exposed.
For me nothing has changed until we go to those grounds and actually win, or at least we could’ve taken the point. Nothing will change from talking after the game, but it’s disappointing.
Hopefully we can bounce back against Everton and see some new faces in the EL.
Konstantin

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57 Comments

  1. Ten Hag just used a park-the-bus tactic that Mourinho and Rodgers always does against us, which could go either way

    I think our players and manager were just too intimidated by Man United supporters

    1. Agree with you but as I said before in another comment on mine Arteta lost the tactical game. This is how Man united have been playing against big teams at home. They sit back and hit on counter to utilise the pace they have upfront. They don’t have the quality to open up defences any more when they have majority of possession hence struggle against small teams. We should have learnt from Liverpool defeat and should have played this as away game not as home. Sooner or later united would have had to come out under the pressure of home crowd to get a winner and that was our opportunity to counter with our pace. We were just too eager to win and played right into their hands. But I am sure at home Emirates it will be a completely different story we might see same score line but reversed in our favour.

      1. Yes. It might’ve been better to lure Man United into our half, because they were under pressure of their own supporters

        Ten Hag showed his experience as a serial Eredivisie winner

    2. On the positive side, we fought our way back in the game in a manner that we have not usually been doing for a few seasons in big matches. The problem was after the goal went in we lacked the experience to change the tempo of the game after the equalizer. We let United play on the break and we punished for it.
      We really not have a lot of experience in the side.

    3. Again,,, a load of nonsense. I don’t know how you come up with such silly comments. How was Arteta and his players intimidated by the Man U supporters???? Not like the Newcastle vs Arsenal of last season,,, that was Arsenal intimidated by the Newcastle supporters and not showing up. But as for this match, Arsenal were certainly not intimidated by Man U supporters. I think you are getting confused with the 8-2 drubbing of 11 years ago

      1. hahaaa. i wonder where gotanidea gets his ideas from! its so silly to state that profesional players and manager are intimidated by fans of the opposition team.

        And it was obvious that we lost the game because our manager and players underestimated man utd and thought they are very capable of winning away at old trafford.

        Now hows that being intimidated by the man u fans?

  2. It’s more like we underestimated man utd, u have seen this guys football from their last 3 game and you still let it happen well we move on to the next games ahead

  3. There was nothing intimidating about that United team and the fans. They got outplayed, and it’s not the first time.
    The played same way against Liverpool, Leicester, Southampton and us, score one goal and get outplayed while defending with their lives. It’s juts like our run under Emery. The results ain’t telling the actual truth about how they play as a team.
    You can see they struggle to play under the press and they struggled to string passes unlike us.
    It was a good game plan from us, but Arteta could’ve done better. Asked the team to press United, they have no press resistant players and they’re less technical than us all over the pitch. Put them under the press and force them to go long, knowing Saliba and Gabriel’s height will help win most of their aerial balls. I don’t understand why we didn’t press like we do.
    There’s so much positives from us, like Arteta said, it won’t affect our confidence. We’ll pick up next week.
    I’ll be seeing the Europa league game just so I can watch Vieria play. ESR is injured again🤦🏽‍♂️
    His fitness level is a concern, and it’s funny there were people who were abusing Arteta and saying he just didn’t want to play the boy when Arteta went about his fitness issues before he got blooded into the team that Dec.
    I don’t understand what he did yesterday that he went into the dressing room injured again.
    Hope he recovers early, we can’t have players going out injured now that Europa league is here

    1. It happened with Martinelli. Mikel kept him out of the team for a long while to sort his fitness problems out.

    2. Nice analysis Eddie.

      I don’t really think there is anything special about this United and I don’t get the hype around them.. they are brilliant at counting FULL STOP.

      I’m confident this result won’t affect the team’s morale, hoping for a nice bounce back on Thursday.
      Onward and upward

  4. Konstantin we shit ourselves in the foot, we knew how Manchester will play yet didn’t plan nor anticipate the on how to mitigate/ twart their counter attacks and boy they did them well. We should have killed the tempo after equalising, they were the team under pressure, playing at home wherus we only needed not to loose .

    1. This season it will how we respond after defeats because we know eithihad, Anfield and Lane we wont get any points. So we will see how the team as matured in one year based on how they respond to these defeats. First test is now after loosing to united. If we do downhill in few games after this then we have not learnt anything from previous matches. Plus its also a test for our fans as well how mature they are instead of poiting guns and piling pressure on the team they should really back them in next match to bounce back. I have a feeling that is exactly what fans will do at Emirates if current support we have seen at Emirates to go by.

  5. Well from my own point of view I’ll blame the Coach. The lads give their best! When we equalised, we should have withdrawn a little and take control instead of rushing and keeping a very high line which leaves us exposed. I assume the coach supposed to caution them. Their midfield is better or more experienced than our own since we have Sambi who’s not yet exposed to big games and formidable opposition. We are still leading, I hope we will learn. Need for a very good DM that can complement Partey!

  6. Looking at the disallowed goal by Martinelli showed us why we needed a midfielder who can intercept opposition attacks. The counter was on so quickly after that recovery. We don’t have any midfielders on the roster capable of doing that.

  7. Well we go again I’d take 15points from a possible 18 .viera- had a great Cameo and didn’t shy from shooting,if the few minutes he was on the pitch are anything to go by we might have found another gem. And as Arteta said we go again, no confidence shuttered

  8. I am pleasantly surprised to go along with most of your comments KM as you and I tend to have differing views on the subject of our team and Manager who has to learn to walk before he can run.Your use of the word naive is spot on on this occasion..Having equalised, we had the opportunity to play an ordinary Man Utd side at their own game.Instead we pushed on for the winner and were caught with two sucker punches.Many will applaud the attacking philosophy used by Arteta, but to me this was a great opportunity to bring Utd out of their shell and create space to cash in.Arteta will probably stick to his guns but his desire to “control” the match is worthless if we lose 3 points.A draw at Old Trafford is perfectly acceptable to me and I suspect most rational Arsenal fans but unfortunately we passed up a great opportunity to do just that. On another matter, I am concerned at the witch hunt which seems to be taking place against Sambi.Let’s get the facts straight.He was not directly responsible for the loss of the first two goals.Zinchenko and the much vaunted Saliba were found wanting but because they are revered by certain fans as “new additions” they seem to be exempt for criticism?Saliba in particular needs to improve his positional sense and back off when faced with a speedmerchant like Rachford.In the case of Zinchenko he was sucked in and left Anthony unattended.Basically he is a central midfield player not a left back and for that reason I was very surprised to see Tierney left on the bench.

    1. @Grandad
      I feel like if we had scored then sat back a bit and United scored or it ended 1-1, we would still be questioning why after equalising Arteta went defensive.. We would be saying “United were there for the taking but naive / inexperienced Arteta bottled the 3 points”.

      I just feel like our attackers are not clinical enough, we create loads of chances but end up scoring about 2 goals each match and encourage the opponents to gain confidence.

      Since the season started I noticed this trend where we create loads but are not clinical enough. We end up turning these matches into a bag of nerves for ourselves.

      1. @Goonster
        For the most part I agree with you. The “naive” thing: that’s classic Monday morning quarterbacking.
        Personally, I would not have gone so “gung ho” but I can understand the reasoning. People really need to rethink this penchant for hailing people throwing around discourteous comments.
        It is also worth considering that this is probably as good a time as any to adopt such an attacking approach as whatever happened we would still be top of the league at the end of the weekend.

    2. Grandad, the niaivity started with the selections and the high defensive line given the speed of the United forward line. Credit for being on the front foot and a positive approach, but it has to be tempered with some caution. Once again Arsenal was burnt by poor finishing. The referee was poor in not issuing yellow cards for cynical fouling by United.

  9. I don’t know why but for some reason we seem to leave our brains at Emirates everytime we visit Old Trafford. Hopefully we finally learned yesterday, we should have been the ones parking the bus

  10. Personal thought it was an even game and was surprised how good Utd played after their crappy start to the season .
    Unfortunately they took their chances we didn’t simple as that .
    Abit naive after the subs came on but we needed freshening up .
    Still top ,so on to the next .

  11. I would totally agree with Eddie comments
    The result was disappointing but our actual play for 65 to 70 was great
    We looked a cut a above United.
    We got done by a few ragged moments where they cut us apart with great split passes
    Some of the Subs were questionable but he went for the win rather than a draw and who are we to question that kind of mentality, Would we rather park the bus at 1-1?
    We will win much more games with this kind of attitude and 25 wins is still well within our grasp.
    No one likes losing, especially me but so many positives out of this game and we will only get stronger
    6 down and 32 to go so still at long way to go
    We don’t sit top of the league after 6 games being a bad team over night

  12. Such naive management. When we equalised we should have tightened up and not have attacked without covering properly. It was like a gung-ho boxer dropping his defenses, forgetting to box and getting KO’d. So naive. Also WHY did we not sign a midfield player when we had plenty of time to do that. Self-harm!

  13. Why did we dominate the game? It’s a tactic by Ten Hag: to allow us to play while they pass through our backyard as we press without cover.

    Why are smaller teams more at ease against MU than us? We were a little nervous. Until we have the real mentality to win, we can’t progress

  14. I don’t think Arteta lost the tacticall game, I think it was more a case of certain players letting him down. Overall, Arsenal were wasteful and careless, Manure were not. The result will certainly have given him some food for thought and both players and manager move forward from here, tweeking where necessary but also taking the positives into account.

    1. So much sense in your response.

      A lot of people here are back to throwing blames, and trust me except we had won, they still would have found something negative to say about Arteta.

      Our only problem was not finishing chances. We had a total of 16 shots and only 3 on target, while they had 10 and 6 were on target, from their 6 on target they scored 3, while we were only able to convert 1 of ours.

      Our attack needs to start finishing of in a better way.

      I don’t know why some persons here just don’t want to see positives.

    2. Joe when you lose a game, invariably you lose tactically. We were in control at 1-1 and lost, the substitutions as they were changed the shape, the balance, the flow and the control. Tactics lost the game. The substitutions and the way they were done were scatter gun and not needed. 1-1 should have been the least result yesterday and it wasn’t. The result was poor in the circumstances and worrying.

      1. Did you miss the game? 😉
        The substitutions weren’t done at 1-1.
        They were done 8 min. after we had fallen behind 2-1 and at a time, when Man U had eased the pressure, we put on them earlier.
        Taking off Lokonga was the only way to go. He seemed very tired, and wasn’t all there, when they scored 2-1.
        Odegaard and Zinchenko had been injured leading up to the match, so could it have been best to take him off?
        And overall; there were 16 min. to go, we were behind, and no longer on top of the game.
        Arteta tried to change the way things were going with what he had available, but it didn’t come off.

        1. Yes Anders i did see the game and the second goal was like the third and to a lesser extent the first because we played a stupid badly conceived high line. At 1-1 we had control of the game and got done by a ball over the top. At 2-1 down, disrupting the game like we did was the nail in the coffin. The tactic of the high line and the substitutions were our undoing. Our two central defenders starting positions on both Rashfords goals was wrong all game. A simple instruction off the bench would have sorted that. Neither of them were actually picking Rashford up, he was in between them all the time, free to pull off both. They only had one player up top and we left him, that was poor.

          1. It wasn’t just the two goals in the second half, we had a few similar escapes, people are conveniently forgetting where utd could have had two more goals doing the same thing. We never sorted that detail out.

            1. You are correct in highlighting the positional weaknesses of our centre backs which basically cost us the game.I have never been convinced by Gabriel and I am not prepared to run with the herd as far as Saliba is concerned. As he is finding out, any mistakes in the EPL are invariably punished.He is undoubtedly a talented lad but he is far from the finished article .

              1. I dont think Gabriel and Saliba are the problem but the way Arteta sets them up and what he expects from them. They are both very good players (with limitations like most player) but the whole back line is like 4 individual defenders, not a compact defense.

  15. The same old “We played well but but…”

    We have to start saying “We played well and deserved the 3 points”.

    It just feels like the same old habit of “A moral victory”.

    It’s frustrating.

  16. Reggie, bringing all three subs on at the same time was clearly a gamble which backfired, but something had to be done. Sometimes these things work and when they do the manager is a hero. Taking Odegaard for me was a hasty call, but he had been in doubt before the game and had possibly run himself into the ground.

    1. Joe, it was the way he changed what was working and made what wasn’t working worse. The changes were ill concieved and not very clever. There was time still on the clock, you get desperate with 5 minutes to go not 20. Utd were changing their shape and we didnt do anything to counter it. The other thing that was not sorted and we cant di anything about is we have no striker we can throw on and pile balls into the box. We just carried on playing exacly the same type of football. You have to be able to mix it up, we cant.

      1. Reggie my call was to bring on Tierney, move Zivchenko in the middle, taking off Xhaka, as well as replacing Saka with ESR. It would have given Arsenal more mobility. Everything else happened so quickly after that much to our cost. I can’t fault Arteta this time because even at 1-2 down he was looking for a positive result. This shows that he has a lot more confidence in his players. Over the past two seasons he has been very conservative against the big five teams and more often than not we have still come out second best.

  17. The article said everything I wanted to say, thank you! After making great exertion to tie the game, we need to calm down, rest up, regroup, then and only then, we can think about what to do next, not ‘bravely’ going forward! That was a 6 point game, for crying out loud!

    Why do we make the same mistakes over and over again.!!

    1. “SIX POINT” GAME WITH THREE POINTS TO THE WINNERS, JUST THE SAME AS EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THE PREM!

      HARD POST TO MAKE SENSE OF THEREFORE.

  18. We have lost the game and its over, let’s move on to the next match. Complaining or giving excuses or blaming the manager or the players won’t bring the 3 points back…… Even when Arsenal was at their best( Arsene) day and utd was bad ( Ferguson day and rashford first game in the league) they beat us in oldtraford, so let’s forget about it and support the team in our next game….COYG….

  19. Get Adam’s in to teach our defence how to keep a line high or otherwise.

    Some Nativity on selection and strategy IMO in terms of chasing the game. Easy with Hindsight but they just picked us off.

    We played the better football for sure but that means nothing if the other team scores more than you and you lose matches.

  20. Agree 100%. As you say the most depressing element was that you knew before a ball was kicked what the outcome would be and why. Since 2008 every side has lacked the mental ability, and the tactical nous to beat the big clubs. We get the odd result, at home, but never away. We let an ordinary utd side take advantage of that mental frailty to grab three soft goals, and the press the opportunity to add yet more hype to utds cause, while enjoying themselves at our expense. In other words we made the medias day. Again. Whether we beat Everton or not is irrelevant. Until someone, somewhere at the club draws up a plan to get the team back to where it was between 1987-2008, we’ll continue to be also rans.

  21. Always hard when you lose to an inferior team .. that said you shoukd always try to play your best players in position especially in games like this .. Tomi and tiernay our best fullbacks .. zhichenko a better midfield option … so some of this was self inflicted .. my worry is not learning from these correctable mistakes which is a trait I see in arteta .. Everton a good game to correct

  22. This is the same way we’ve always lost to Spurs and Man U. Arsenal should be going to teams that use counterattacking with a plan to steal a point or three. Tottenham always beats Man City using same same styles but it seems we learn nothing. Some we need to win ugly.

  23. Agree 100% with logic.After scoring thd equaliser,the gunners threw caution to the wind to get the winner.
    MU were coiled like a cobra to strike.With a hdl even my 100year old uncle could score.
    MA better be wary of Everton

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