Last night Arsenal kept their second clean sheet against Man United this season, and kept our unbeaten League record since Christmas. Considering Ole Gunar’s team was also in a rich vein of form, and the Gunners were without Saka, Tierney and Aubameyang, it was an even better achievement.
The game was a cagey affair right from the start but United did have a couple of very good chances in the first half, but after Arteta’s half time talk we were creating many more chamces and could have won it ourseves.
Arteta was not too upset after the draw, although he was very pleased with our resilient performance, particularly in the second half. “I thought it was a fair result.” the boss told Arsenal.com. “I think both managers probably think they should have won it. I think it was a big game. I think we played face-to-face against each other. I think both teams wanted to win it. None of us scored a goal so it’s impossible to win. The fact we had three of our best players out probably has an impact [on the game] but I’m really happy with the players that played today and how we tried and most importantly how the game developed at the end. In the second half we were so dominant and had some big chances to win it.”
Arteta did surprise the Arsenal fans by taking off Martinelli at the break and replacing him with Willian, and Arteta was pleased with the players reaction. “Well, we made some changes with a few things that we had to fix to be much more efficient, to be much closer to them, to be more effective in our high press and the areas where we could regain the ball and then we had a better structure to attack. We were more of a threat and we stopped giving the ball back to the opponent when we won it and we had much space to run, which is something that against United can really punish you and in the first half we didn’t do that well enough.”
After looking at the team sheets, there were many fans that would have been happy with the draw, so at least we weren’t too disappointed, and we have kept our unbeaten run going.
But we just have to pick ourselves back up and get ready to go yet again on Tuesday when we travel to Wolves to try and pick up some more points…
Onwards and upwards!