16 Conclusions from Arsenal 2-1 Chelsea: Havertz, Odegaard, Rogers, keepers, dummies, Gary Neville Noises | OneFootball

Arsenal have landed the first major early blow in the title race after beating potential challengers Chelsea 2-1 in a high-quality and pleasingly entertaining clash at the Emirates.

And that was despite Chelsea keeping up their penchant for outrageous fast starts this season and playing pretty well after that.

Even in defeat, Chelsea have shown they are going to be a proper team this season. Which only makes Arsenal’s win all the more impressive and significant. It’s very, very early but this felt very, very big.

1. It didn’t feel like a September match, did it? This felt like a title clash that carried far more weight, far greater consequence, than any September clash really can. How important it actually proves is impossible to know – and let’s not forget that the vital title decider that took place in April last season turned out to mean nothing.

But a game that pitted the two most impressive starters this season was of such high quality throughout that it’s hard to imagine this game won’t prove a hugely significant early moment in the story of the 2026/27 Premier League season.

2. And you know a game is of vital importance, and has got off to a stunning start, when you get three Gary Neville Noises within the first quarter of an hour. First for Morgan Rogers’ opener, then for the melee inside Chelsea’s six-yard box that ended with Emi Martinez taking a rogue boot to the head, and finally for Arsenal’s disallowed goal from another goalmouth scramble.

This always felt like it would be a game that came with guaranteed Gary Neville Noises. Before kick off, we’d have given it a predicted xGNN of about 2.5; to clear that inside the opening minutes was more than we could ever have hoped for.

3. This, the obvious standout fixture from the opening three rounds of the season, was a day where the result was always going to trump performance. It really could mean everything in the final analysis. So for Arsenal to get the result and the performance they got makes this a red-letter day for the Gunners.

Already this season they have demonstrated their ability to find different ways to win matches. They’ve overpowered a promoted side, outlasted a top-four team from last season and now battled back from a goal down to ultimately outclass a team that could very easily be their closest rival this season.

4. And there was a freedom about Arsenal that was compelling. There was nothing of the Horlicks FC about this Arsenal performance. Nothing boring. Nothing one-dimensional. Sure, this was still a game where set-pieces were of great significance. Chelsea’s goal came from a set-piece, as did those two Neville-inspiring early incidents at the other end.

Nicolas Jover and Austin MacPhee’s fingerprints were visible because how could they not be? But it never felt like that was all this game had to offer.

5. We do enjoy Chelsea’s approach to attempting to counter Arsenal’s infamous set-piece murderball threat, which involves leaving multiple players forward and forcing Arsenal into a response. The outcome is a bizarrely sparsely populated penalty area for Arsenal’s corners.

It’s a high-risk strategy and we’re not even particularly convinced that it’s a good one in the round given the extra space it affords Arsenal players if they do happen to win the first ball. Certainly it seemed to leave Chelsea vulnerable to the deep corner aimed to a free player beyond the back post to head back across and into the danger area.

But it certainly makes Arsenal think and adds a layer of possible counter-attacking jeopardy if the corner is successfully cleared.

And at the very, very least it’s nice to see a team trying something different to counter Arsenal’s set-piece dominance – something that in fairness they first tried under the much-derided Liam Rosenior last season – rather than just f*cking moaning about it.

6. But it’s also clear that set-pieces need not be such a large part of the puzzle for Arsenal this season anyway. And a large part of the reason Arsenal feel such a different team to watch is down to the rejuvenated work of Martin Odegaard, who seems a player whose belief and energy levels have been thoroughly restored by a brilliant World Cup with Norway.

7. But while Odegaard was vital and a worthy man of the match after running the show and scoring the winner, we’d be lying to ourselves and, worse, to you if we pretended he was our favourite today. That was Kai Havertz, and it wasn’t particularly close.

He’s a fascinating footballer, is Havertz. At times he can seem almost for me, Clive, if anything too clever a player. He sometimes seems to see just too many possibilities in any situation and can thus often appear guilty of picking the wrong one. Or on some occasions just sort of overheating and picking no option at all.

This was a game that had all of Havertz. His equaliser was expertly taken, albeit assisted as he was by Chelsea’s defenders turning into static training cones for 10 vital seconds and Emi Martinez picking an unfortunate moment to go all Robert Sanchez on us.

But the true Havertz moments were the two dummies he attempted to create chances for Odegaard. He had a go at one in the first half that was, frankly, inexplicable. He was in a better shooting position than Odegaard and here the simplest and most obvious option – just put your f*cking foot through it, man – was without doubt the correct one. He tried something far more complicated and far sillier, to a collective and familiar groan.

Undeterred, he tried it again in the early minutes of the second half. Here it was without doubt the correct decision, taking Chelsea’s entire defence out of the game and leaving Odegaard with time and space to lash home what proved the winner.

Just the confidence to have another go at a move he’d already misjudged so badly earlier in the game was impressive. And it sums up the deal one has to make when it comes to Havertz. If you can’t handle him at his stupid dummy to try and set up Odegaard, you don’t deserve him at his genius dummy to try and set up Odegaard.

8. It was also a textbook case study for our ongoing Make Dummies An Assist campaign, and for that we thank him. Havertz doesn’t allow convention to dictate his approach and nor should we. He created that goal in every way that matters. An insistence that you have to actually touch the ball to get an assist is reductive and outdated. We will die upon this hill.

9. What made this win all the more impressive for Arsenal – and why Chelsea need not be too despondent – is that the visitors really did play well. The league table might not say it right now, but we’re still relatively comfortable in saying Chelsea remain the second best team we’ve seen this season. Sorry if that offends, Man City/Hull/etc.

Chelsea started the game brilliantly, as has become their trademark this season. Morgan Rogers’ goal inside the first 90 seconds makes Xabi Alonso’s side the first ever to score inside five minutes of each of their first three games of a Premier League season, and Arsenal needed their best and most complete performance of the season to date to turn the situation around.

Chelsea’s plan was solid. They forced the best out of Arsenal and on another day could still have got a different result. They used Pedro Neto as a highly effective out-ball for counter-attacks, most notably right at the end of the first half when great vision from Joao Pedro set him away for a chance he eventually sent against the foot of David Raya’s post.

10. We’ve already seen that Chelsea are a team that don’t mind playing without the ball, but it all just ended up going a bit far at times here. Arsenal were just too relentless and too resistant to error. It’s one thing only having 40 per cent of the ball and making it work, but here Chelsea had to try and make their plan work with about 20 per cent of it for long periods. It was always a tall order.

Chelsea may well be the second best team in the league, and this method is one that may well work pretty consistently against pretty much everyone else. But the gap to Arsenal remains a chasm.

11. There will be a lot of attention on Emi Martinez this season. There’s no doubt he’s a massive upgrade on Robert Sanchez and makes Chelsea a far better team. But he remains at times an erratic keeper. We have in the past described him as Heurelho Gomes with good PR, which was definitely a bit much but only a bit.

His best work is outstanding but we just fancy his mistakes will get that much more attention now he’s at Chelsea rather than Villa. Default criticism of a near-post concession always riles up our resident Goalkeeper365 correspondent Ian Watson, but Havertz shot came from a fair way out and wasn’t exactly a bullet of a strike. It did feel like this was very Should Do Better There areas for the Argentina keeper.

12. That said, David Raya’s first Premier League concession of the season felt similar. Again, Morgan Rogers’ volley had accuracy but not power from a slightly scruffy connection. Raya, like Martinez, had taken a crucial step in the wrong direction when setting himself, leaving him unable to get down and across far enough to keep the ball out.

13. Which also leaves Hull City’s Konstantinos Tzolakis out on his own as the only keeper in the Premier League with a perfect record of three clean sheets, just as we all predicted before a ball was kicked. Raya is the only other keeper to manage even two. Martinez and Chelsea still await their first. The fact only Ipswich and Crystal Palace have conceded more goals than a Chelsea team everyone pretty correctly agrees to be title contenders is an early-season quirk right up there with the fact three whole teams still haven’t bothered scoring a single goal yet.

14. Before Havertz got his Martinez-assisted equaliser, Riccardo Calafiori thought he’d levelled for Arsenal from the second penalty-area melee in quick succession.

It took Gary Neville an uncomfortable amount of time to realise why it would obviously be disallowed, with Ezri Konsa both very obviously offside and very obviously making contact with the ball.

But Neville got so bogged down in whether Konsa was interfering with Martinez he didn’t even consider for the longest time the more straightforward and rudimentary way a player can be interfering with play.

Neville corrected himself and admitted he’d got it wrong once he realised, but it felt revealing. Any of us can sometimes miss the wood for the trees, but it felt like Neville’s first instinct here was to get a controversy going. The starting point for him was that there was going to be a big VAR call so what are the ways it could be controversial, which is why he missed the obvious thing that made it not at all controversial.

This isn’t really about Gary Neville, but a reminder for all of us that we might all avoid getting our heads quite so hot quite so often if we don’t start the debate on every VAR call from a point of antagonism. Let’s at least try and wait for it to actually f*ck something up before reaching instinctively for the pitchforks.

15. There were a couple of significant moments involving Rogers and erstwhile team-mates that we enjoyed.

The first was a promising Chelsea counter-attack in the second half which fell apart when Rogers’ slightly heavy touch opened the door for his former Villa colleague Konsa to come in with a robust and timely challenge of the sort sure to win over a slightly sceptical new fanbase. That was all good clean fun.

16. The second was much naughtier and thus more fun, when Rogers’ England team-mate Declan Rice pretty brazenly tripped him as Chelsea pushed for an equaliser with another promising counter. After Cole Palmer eventually missed the chance, there was much pointing and finger-wagging between Rice and Rogers, with the ultimate dust-settled outcome being just a yellow card for Rogers.

Not sure that was quite the correct outcome, for what it’s worth. Playing on because the ball had made its way for Palmer to get a shot away was fine, but we were surprised not to see play brought back for the foul. Rice was certainly lucky that his name stayed out of Chris Kavanagh’s notebook.