Manchester United have claimed all three points at Old Trafford today with a 3-1 win over Arsenal.
The home team started the brighter but were struggling to break our backline down, and we looked to have found ourselves the opening goal through a fine counter-attack, with Gabriel Martinelli finding the back of the net, only for VAR to deny us thanks to a soft foul in the build-up.
We used that denial to focus however and began to get on top ourselves, and just as things were looking brighter on our end, we were then hit on the counter. Two intricate passes up front left Antony in behind our defence to place his one-touch effort around Aaron Ramsdale to leave us trailing.
We came out after the break on a mission, and quickly began to show our dominance, and that finally paid off when the ball fell to Bukayo Saka to send it home with the goalkeeper out of position. Unfortunately our dominant spell was once again our undoing as we were hit by yet another counter attack, this time with Bruno Fernandes splitting our defence completely open with a painfully good ball into the path of Marcus Rashford to run up to our box and score.
Some claim Arteta opted to go too attacking after falling behind again, and we were duly punished once more. This time it was Christian Eriksen who met the ball in behind the Arsenal back-line, before laying in his team-mate Rashford to tap it in to make it 3-1, and the writing was on the wall at that point.
You can take this result a number of ways. We can feel dismayed by the early disallowed goal which would no doubt have changed the way the game played out. We can blame Arteta’s decision to throw the kitchen sink in search of a result too early, but overall we should be happy with the performance put in.
Patrick