Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy was once again the villain in North London, as he ruined Thomas Partey’s full Premier League debut for Arsenal with a party of his own.
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta made the move to change the formation for today’s encounter, fielding a midfield three of Granit Xhaka, Thomas Partey and Dani Ceballos.
Fans had been asking for a return to a back four for a while, and seeing the trio given the nod today was always going to excite the masses.
We didn’t have to wait long to see the new system impress, as Alexandre Lacazette opened the scoring, but the referee ruled it out because of Granit Xhaka’s position inside the box, although he didn’t make contact with the ball…
Arsenal continued to pile on the pressure, and Lacazette could well have found himself on a hat-trick had he been stronger in the air, but the opening goal continued to evade us.
Shortly into the second-half, we lost David Luiz to injury, with Shkodran Mustafi coming on, with Jamie Vardy coming on 10 minutes later on the hourmark. Both of these changes didn’t bring me much excitement, but our team continued to play positively.
While we carried on trying to push up the field, our rivals were starting to look more and more dangerous thanks to bringing on their talisman, and with just 10 minutes left to go, the daunting thing happened.
Jamie ‘I love to play Arsenal’ Vardy gets himself on the scoresheet…
The English forward burst forward alongside fellow substitute Cengiz Under, and the Turkish international didn’t disappoint by finding his team-mate open in the box to open the scoring.
The timing left us with only 10 minutes to get back, and you would have expected a fight-back in the dying minutes, especially when the officials gifted us five minutes extra to claw back a result. That wasn’t to be however, and the only real chance to score after the goal was from that man Jamie Vardy again.
The team was setup positively, the first-half was all Arsenal, but for the second time in two weekends, our players failed to be clinical in front of goal, and that is now two losses where we were very much the better side overall.
Does Saka need to work on his finishing? Does the whole team need to work on their sharpness in front of goal? Where do you think we went wrong?
Patrick