Arsenal’s new team under Unai Emery was not quite up to speed as they succumbed meakly to Pep Guardiola’s admittedly superior team of Champions. Petr Cech did extremely well to keep out the City strikers but we didn’t really do enough to test the City defence either. Sokratis and Mustafi were our centre-back pairing and are very inexperienced together, and Guendouzi had never played in a Premiership game before in his life but actually wasn’t too bad.
But which was the main reason for our defeat? According to Cech, it was because we didn’t make enough of our chances at the other end. “We feel that we could have got something from the game,” he said.
“In the second half, we forced them to make mistakes and we had some opportunities. But unfortunately, we lacked invention to find the killer pass.
“When you play against a team of City’s quality and confidence it is always going to be difficult. Inevitably, you can make a few mistakes.
“It was a shame we couldn’t finish off our counter attacks and overall we’re disappointed with the defeat.”
So Petr thinks it was the forwards to blame, but i’m not so sure. We simply have to face the fact that this was the hardest possible game for Emery to start his Arsenal career, and he was starting with a team that still has a lot to learn about each other and the manager’s tactics and instructions. It was never going to be easy, so don’t be so hard on the team or the boss. We still have 37 games to go to get things right! At least the hardest game is out of the way….