Result: Southampton 1 – 0 Arsenal
Competition: Premier League
Date: 16 April 2022
Venue: St. Mary’s Stadium
Arsenal: Ramsdale; Cedric, White, Gabriel, Tavares; Lokonga, Xhaka; Saka, Odegaard, Martinelli; Nketiah
Subs: Leno, Holding, Ogungbo, Swanson, Elneny, Azeez, Smith Rowe, Hutchinson, Pepe
Arsenal put in another mediocre performance and registered a third loss on a row away to Southampton. The only goal was scored by Bednarek at the tail end of the first half.
Arsenal did have rare chances on goal, with Saka’s first half effort looking like a sure bet, but Foster was always available to deny their efforts throughout the 90 minutes.
Pre-Match
After over-complicating his line-up in the last game, Arteta’s lineup focused on playing his players in their most natural positions.
Tavares had an opportunity to play himself back into form at left back while Xhaka returned to the centre of the park alongside Sambi. Lacazette, who looked out of form, did not make the squad and was replaced by Nketiah.
The rest of the team remained unchanged from the last game.
First Half
After being thrashed in their last game, Southampton looked to keep things tight and conservative – sitting back to ensure they didn’t concede early.
Arsenal took advantage of this by playing higher up the pitch with a fleet-footed Nketiah flanked by Saka and Martinelli on the left and right respectively.
The Gunners controlled the game within the first 25 minutes but lacked cutting edge as they too were reeling from a confidence sapping loss. Our young and speedy forwards were patiently probing with dribbles and exchanges with their midfield as Southampton piled on the numbers at the back to avoid another drubbing.
There were moments of positivity from the Arsenal. Martinelli had a decent shot on goal from outside the box saved but it was mostly both teams trying to find their rhythm.
One that should have put the home side to the sword was when Nketiah stole the ball on a break. It was 3v3 as he passed to Martinelli on the right. Martinelli fizzed in a low pass to Saka who was waiting in the centre of the box. Saka shot right in the middle at chest level that an onrushing Foster parried with strong hands. While the save looked excellent, Saka should have put that out of sight by passing the ball into the bottom corner instead.
Most of the rest of the first half was a tepid affair but Southampton were racking up their corners towards the end. Unfortunately, the home side took advantage of the corners they were given. After a clearance, Southampton regained possession and lobbed the ball in for Elyounoussi to cross in. Bednarek tapped in from close range. 1-0 Southampton
Second Half
Arsenal started the match the same way they ended – plenty of possession with hardly any chances created. It was not helped by Cedric making crosses into the box for his teammates but there was not a target adept at attacking those crosses.
He made way for Smith Rowe on the 59th minute. The team went to 3 at the back with Xhaka an advanced left centre back and Tavares pushing up the left wing.
The tactical change allowed the Gunners to up the pressure and move an extra player up the pitch to dominate possession 80-20 by the 60th minute.
Chances came at a premium as the home side sat very deep and denied space. And when Smith Rowe and Xhaka did manage to pull off a strike, Forster was there to deny Arsenal.
It was a slog to the end and while Arsenal didn’t deserve to lose, their tepid performance didn’t deserve the full 3 points either. A consolation was that Spurs lost their corresponding game but Arsenal have to improve their performances in this last stretch of the season to ensure they meet their objective of finishing in a European place.
What a waste of time that was.
D*mn right it was. What happens now in the summer will be very interesting, and will likely shape our short term future.
I think our attack is more worrying than our defense. We just can’t seem to find a way to score a goal anymore. I think our defense tonight is quite okay, bar that lapse in concentration that cost us goal. But it will be different had we not wasted many opportunity in front of goal. We’re just nor clinical enough that it makes Forster look like the greatest GK in the world. I’m afraid this is not the performance that will give us ucl ticket. But, better luck next times, still have a slightest chance as Sp*rs also lost 3… Read more »
We’ve relied on a huge number of goals from midfield / wide players and a relatively high conversion rate most of the year. This likely is just a bit of return to mean as it’s tough to challenge for top 4 without any kind of threat up top. Hopefully Arteta gets this figured out as this is best chance at top 4 we’ve had in years – the competition has had poor seasons while our 1 game a week all year is also a big advantage.
Maybe I was blinded by two great months. And of course, we are missing Partey and KT.
But come on! No clever and good runs, no drive forward, doggy passes and a lack of character.
Slowly but surely I’m starting to blame Mikel for this shitshow.
I was starting to come round to him after that run, but enough is enough now. He’s had enough chances. Even had a whole season without midweek games so he could focus on the next game each weekend. He’s not good enough.
I feel you! I was genuinly excited after our run. It all seemed to come together. Man was I wrong.
hooray, you have seen the light. I just hope the board doesnt let him waste more money
This manager out stuff is like a soap opera, do leave it out!?
Welcome to the world of football.
I wouldn’t mind it if they just stopped him from throwing away money in the form of giving away saleable assets for free-peanuts.
Old news move on…
That’s the trouble mate.
Come the summer, it’ll become brand new news again…..
Tis the hope that kills you.
For me it was Cedric’s crosses.
And the freekicks. Just pure masterclass!
Whose idea was it to take crosses like wtf why not odegard.
Who’s idea is it to cross it in?
We whip them in like we’ve got Giroud up front
It was the style of play for me.
Arsenal only need to score 4 goals in each game (28 in the next 7) to equal the 73 goals Emery’s team scored when he fumbled top 4.
Typical. I don’t understand how we have just fallen off a cliff.
Obviously it’s the fault of whoever put out predictions with us getting 9 points from CP, Brighton, and Southampton.
Was that Mangan or McNicholas?
It is relying on Saka or Smith Rowe putting the ball in the net. Sooner or later they dry up, then you obviously want your number 9 to step up to the plate and realise you don’t have one.
It’s not, it’s just pressure. How can you blame the CF for losing 3-0 to place…
It has coincided with Tierney’s injury. It’s only one player but it seems to have completely knocked us out.
There were punters here earlier in the season wanting Nuno to take LB position in preference to KT. Similarly wanting to have Sambi in place of Party.
We’re no better at it than MA?
“We are no better at it than MA” talk about scraping the barrel to try to find a positive 🤣
You can count me out of that lot, chief.
KT and Partey were always the real deal in my opinion.
Tierney and Partey have been the biggest losses. Tierney not only does a great job at LB, the rest of the defence are relaxed to play their own game with confidence. At the moment, there is an elephant in the left back room. As for Partey, his abilities to win the ball and quickly turn defence into attack have been underrated by the fanbase due to his tall languid personae, which can be deceptive. Tall guys like Kanu and Vieira were the same – often appearing slow but still able to move the ball quickly at the same time. No,… Read more »
Does MA have to relinquish his Manger of the Month award as a result?
Give it back to Bethlehem I say.
Arteta is a kid as a manager and can’t win if 2-3 players from his first 11 are out. He won’t change the formation to suit the players he has and he plays Nkethia when Pepe or ESR are a lot better options. That’s why we are falling of a cliff.
And to top it off the reason two of the three first 11 players are injured are Arteta himself. He played Tomi when he should be resten and then did the same with Partey. It’s ridiculous. No focus on the marathon, just the sprint.
Some people are of the opinion we weren’t on one. I agree with those people.
Some were calling for nketia. It’s laughable and so so painful. Arteta has won 4 points all season from a losing position. Trust the process.
I doubt it would have made any difference if it was Pepe, Martinelli, or ESR at #9 today.
Who’s fault is that.
Eddie did ok considering how the whole team played
Europe is done. Bring back Vieira. This guy ain’t it.
Fully on board with this. Vieira has made some shrewd signings at Palace.
Respect is earned and he’s got a bucket full of it at Arsenal. Make the call 📞
I’d like to see Vieira, and I’d like to see Vieira given 150 million to spend and under no obligation to sell our better players.
Finally I don’t have to type this myself.
I would love him back. He knows what we are about and it’s not crosses from RB.
I can’t see where any points are coming from. I doubt we win more than 1 or 2 more games this season so we will finish outside of the top six.
We have to play with 5 at the back. Move Saka as wing back and play Elneny and Xhaka in the middle. Smith Rowe, Martineli and Odegaard upfront. It about damage control now; counter attacks and grinding out results.
We could easily be on a run of 8 defeats in a row or at least without a win.
Shit players, shit team, shit manager.
The 2nd and 3rd parts are definitely true. Not sure about the first, but the squad is a joke. Look at that bench today!
Easy tiger
We will be very lucky to get EL Football for next season. The squad as it stands, is not strong enough ; and you have to wonder at Arteta’s powers of motivation’ given these last three results.
True
Arteta, Edu, Stan…
All of you please just fuck off out of my club!!!
Why Stan? In the league, he is the owner who spends the right amount of money.
He created this culture of mediocrity!!
For more than a decade we’ve been average
You think he knows what happened today? Last 3 matches? You think he cares? We’ll never buy the best players with KSE at the helm. Wake the fuck up!
That’s an interesting point. I suspect he gets quarterly financial updates plus a slide at the back called Playing Highlights.
Out of curiosity, are you 12 years old
😂
That’s a worrying trend…
Has anyone ever told you you look like Wenger.
🤠🤠
I take it as a compliment
Is he any good at coaching should be your next question 😂
I’m scared now..and angry
Unfortunately it’s not just our players who are too young and learning on the job, it’s the manager as well. Maybe we over achieved the last couple of months and this was going to be level until the end of the season all along due to the lack of experience from the manager and players
Nothing to do with Artetas age, he’s simply not a good manager, his team selections, substitutions and in game management show that
He’s a bit spursy
Ladies and gentlemen I present to you “same old arsenal”
Would’ve been a surprising result if we hadn’t seen this play out for *checks calendar* 3 seasons now.
Enough of this please. If you can’t get an Arsenal side to take any points from Palace, Brighton or Southampton you don’t deserve to be manager of the club.
Not to worry guys, we’ll still play CL next season. All we need to do is to ensure our rivals – Wolves do not overtake us.
Meanwhile, we’ll lose 6 straight games on the trot.
Thanks, Arteta.
Don’t know now, probably our season ends here. We will only honour fixtures from now on.
Are we chasing top 6 now? Hope we are able to achieve that.
Just ONE FUCKING GOAL IN 270 MINUTES AGAINST PALACE, BRIGHTON AND SOUTHAMPTON!!!!
WE ARE A FUCKING JOKE!!!!
That was courtesy of a hefty deflection too!
Arteta can organize the D but has never been able to organize the offence. It’s always been this way. We simply don’t score enough.
Surely the narrative has to be Arteta has bottled the top 4. Nevermind we were not supposed to challenge for top 4 this season or the injuries to KT and Partey, at the end of the day top 4 was ours to lose and we have. And that’s on him.
People saying Arteta should still be given a chance because we realistically should be 6th or 7th at the start of the season have it wrong in my opinion. We were in total control of our top 4 chances and we spurned it, thru an abysmal January transfer window. That’s the key. We got to this position by a good run of form (a bare minimum in my opinion given the time and money that’s been afforded to Arteta). But the main reason we’re in contention is the teams around us are piss poor. Spurs with a mid season manager… Read more »
They’ll be dancing in the streets of ArtetaOut tonight!
They’re going to walk down to Electric Avenue, and then they’ll get him fired.
Anything that might get Arteta fired is of his own doing and no one else’s.
Suprised that’s what’s concerning you after three dreadful losses.
Damn
Damn damn damn damn damn damn
Can anyone see saka and martinelli starting? I dont.
Staying i meant.
If Saka and Martinelli finished their chances we’d have won that game. They’re young, playing and developing, they won’t want to be going anywhere else any time soon.
well chasing Champions League football with barely a dependable striker was always going to be like playing with a broken foot in the first place. Given the season’s lost already, can we just terminate Nketiah and Lacazette’s contract and play the kids instead?
Just cross the ball over again to a Southampton defenders head, eon’t you.
Why does Forster always look like prime Buffon against us?
You misspelled buffoon.
Cant see us getting many points in the rest of the games. Can’t see where any goals are coming from either. Feels like we could play another two hours in these games and still not score.
Three games against mid table sides (Southampton without a win in 6…seriously wtf!) and with a real chance for top 4 and we manage to lose them all. Worse than that is the uninspiring and unimaginative displays.
Two or three missing first eleven players can’t explain the drop off.
Tierney’s injury is looking like a knock-out blow for us and explains a major part of the drop off. We’ve been lost without him on the left side.
Why wouldn’t missing 30% of your starting 11 explain a drop off? Liverpool, a team with much better depth, dropped off a cliff when they lost ONE player, such is his importance to the team and the way they play. There is enough of a sample size now and the results speak for themselves – the first 11 are excellent and there is way too great a drop off from them to the rest of the squad. Really quite straightforward in my opinion.
Didn’t Liverpool lose Van Dijk, Gomez and Matip last season? They dropped off because they didn’t have any of their CBs and not just one.
Admittedly did not realize how many games those other two missed, so fair enough, but my basic point remains the same – an untouchable team who won the league by a mile became a team who finished third, and was a few points from missing out on CL. Our much thinner squad got by okay without Tomiyasu (whose massive influence is easy to forget now that he’s been out so long) but losing Tierney and, most crucially, Partey was always going to cause serious problems.
At this point I don’t see the need of playing any match Arsenal should just handover the 3points to any team they are meant to play.
I know it’s Easter but Cedric needs to stop with the crosses.
Damn 😅 Too accurate. Unlike Cedric
that’s a punchline
Time to say goodbye to this amateur. All in all, the last 3 years have been some of the worst I’ve ever witnessed at Arsenal, and you’re lying if you don’t think similar
When we have a record signing at the bench in Pepe with this lineup questions have to be asked why he cant get into the team.
I prefer not to speak.
Fuck
Bottlers. We’ve collapsed.
All the Arsenal “predict-o-torn” #content looks like so much embarrassing nonsense now. Which it always was. It’s as if the people making a living following the Arsenal have never actually followed the Arsenal.
The worst of all was the top-4 odds check-in which less than a month ago had Arsenal at 74% of finishing 4th, Sp*ds at 17%, and United at 8%.
What happened to fast tempo build up play? What happened to smooth one touch passes? And how on earth Ben white turns into a slow David Luiz waiting for ages to pass the ball?
Partey got injured (and it was “good Partey” at that), Xhaka dropped deeper, and the wingers are playing with second rate full backs.
Arteta is god 🙏
Can Odegaard make just one through ball. Like please.
he found nketiah and he found saka. i think the better question is where are the runs from ‘strikers’ for him to find.
No that’s an excuse dressed up as a question. He is there to make play. It’s not the 70s. Strikers are quick enough to finish his ideas — if he has any!
How when Southampton had 8 players behind the ball.
they simply did not have 8 players behind the ball. that’s a cliche created from years of va va voom football, which we do not play.
Rewatch the game and you’ll see a pretty highline 4-4-2 with tons of space for anyone brave enough to make a vertical pass.
They were there for the taking.
Another defeats is coming
If this team totally collapses I hope arteta goes. I like him and all but he’ll have to go
I knew Manager of the month was a curse!
Not only MOTM, we got an entire FourFourTwo cover story in this months edition saying it was a “New Hope”
Everyone in this league knows how to beat Arsenal. Nick a goal somehow, then sit off & deny us any space in the last third. Arsenal simply don’t have the ability right now to unlock defences. It’s up to Arteta to try & do something about this with the thin squad he has. Doesn’t look promising
Truthfully, that’s generally how inferior teams try to beat better teams .
Yup, and that’s what the managers of the better teams are paid the big bucks to counter.
Spot on. If we don’t score first then we’re fucked
No, it doesn’t
This is due to the no signings on Jan and that’s on Arteta. He’s had enough time to get this right now and we haven’t improved much since his first game against Bournemouth. He has to go.
Yes and no. Going to the end of the season with a thin squad was always going to be a risk. But, I’m pretty sure everyone was on board with the idea that the Club shouldn’t pay over the odds for a signing in January and instead wait for the summer window to get a striker with the quality needed.
The players we are linked with have the same release clauses now as they did in January. It’s not paying over the odds. It’s balancing the books. And without cl football we will have to pay more wages as an incentive.
We didn’t have CL football in January.
MA will be judged from the decisions he made early and in the middle of the season. I said this earlier. And I will keep repeating it.
Let’s be honest here, this is Arsenal Football club. Our decision making is not like most teams, so I doubt it will come to that.
We’re the same club who tasked three novices with getting us back in the Champions League. When those novices failed disastrously in that task, we then proceeded to give them the highest budget in the club’s history.
If Saka, Smith Rowe, Martinelli and Oodegaard aren’t going to finish their chances, we need to seriously consider moving them on. Get something for them now No sacred cows. then get some grown ass men who can finish a shot and get a manager with an ounce of offensive mentality
We could end up 8th again the way things are going. Either the board has to back Arteta with serious quality in the summer if he does manage to get top 6, or Arteta needs to go. Arteta does well when all first 11 are fit, but as soon as things get a little tricky with injuries etc he just falls apart. Since we are always short of quality in certain areas of the pitch, it seems to make more sense to bring in a more experienced manager to get the most out of what we have.
A “mediocre” performance is very generous. Piss poor in 3 games against piss poor opponents with nothing to play for would be more accurate
If we start next season with Arteta in charge, then something is seriously wrong at Arsenal.
I did not expect Southampton to sit back like that. I think we were a tad more stable but really lacked goal threat yet again. I’m going to go with the positive which is that it was a better performance and Tavares played well. We have a free hit against Chelsea now and if we win that then it’s all to play for. We are not out yet.
Yep. Well said. 👍🍺
And we thought we had a chance of 4th 🤣. 💩
The crazy thing is that, at the time of writing, we still do.
We don’t deserve it – but we still have a chance.