Arsenal offer tantalising glimpse of evolution ahead of a Premier League season defined by revolution | OneFootball

One always has to be careful with the Community Shield.

For the most part, although Arsenal’s own pre-season struggles have challenged this notion in one Mediawatch-baiting newspaper in particular, most people are mostly able to be mostly sensible about most pre-season games.

But the Community Shield is different. In part because of its history, but also because in the past it’s often been one of the few chances to see two of the upcoming season’s key contenders in direct contact with each other, people can all too easily be lulled into confusing it for a game that means something.

There can be a tendency to forget that it’s a pre-season game. That it isn’t real and can’t hurt you.

So any conclusions we draw have to be carefully and extensively caveated. Arsenal are no more about to run away with the title based on this afternoon’s exploits than they were to be crap this season based on a couple of ropey yet equally meaningless results earlier in the month.

Last season even the opening weeks of the actual season itself were full of red herrings, like Liverpool being clear favourites for the title and a now Saudi-bound Tijjani Reijnders being a player-of-the-year contender.

Today is just far, far too early to draw any meaningful conclusions, is what we’re saying here. But also… f*cking hell, that was a paddling. Rare for Man City to lose 3-0; rarer still for that to be a result that flatters them.

Allowing as we must for the inevitability of the fact that, by design, neither of this two teams will be at full steam at this point, it’s hard to be sure just how much of this enormously facile Arsenal win was down to the league champions being excellent and how much was the FA Cup winners being abysmal under their new manager.

But while the exact ratio is hard to determine, the unavoidable conclusion is that both those things contributed to a significant extent.

You shouldn’t really be able to say a goal had been coming when it takes 26 seconds to arrive, and yet…

From the first whistle Arsenal’s strengths and City’s weaknesses were starkly on display here with a goal that perfectly defined ‘tone-setting’ to an almost sarcastic degree.

The speed and precision of Arsenal’s football, with both Myles Lewis-Skelly and Riccardo Calafiori notably excellent. The distractedness of City’s lethargic response. Abdukodir Khusanov being so slow to realise he was dangerously out of position that by the time the penny finally dropped the undoubted pace of his movement was of no use to mitigate the slowness of thought. Gianluigi Donnarumma going down like a roll of lino.

Yes, it was a first-minute goal that set you up for all that was to follow. These became recurring themes, with many of the same cast involved for the second goal as well. Martin Odegaard was given an eternity to pick out his cross beyond the back past where the excellent Christos Tzolis had peeled away from a – you guessed it – out of position Khusanov to send a deceptively clever header back across goal and out of Ruben Dias’ reach for Kai Havertz to nod home with another secondary assist from the City keeper.

Pre-season results don’t matter. But this kind of structural collapse under a new manager must inevitably trigger alarm bells for City.

Khusanov cannot be any kind of answer at right-back for sure. It was wild to see a man discovering in real time just how bad things can be when you’re so disorientated that your extreme pace no longer gets you out of dodge. He was almost never in the right place.

For vast swathes of the first half, City appeared to be playing a back three, so far in did he tuck. But while Nico O’Reilly’s standard approach to inverted left-back play makes him a perfectly viable inverted left wing-back as well, nobody at all seemed to be aware that someone would at least need to make some token effort at giving a similar shape on the other flank. As it was, Calafiori and Tzolis instead gleefully and gratefully feasted upon the two-on-one overload that was theirs all afternoon, Khusanov managing the neat trick of never managing to really pick up or keep track of either one of them.

It really could have been far, far worse for City, especially after Odegaard humiliated Donnarumma early in the second half, sitting the keeper on the floor with a dummy before smiling as he slid the ball into the now unguarded net with the City defence conspicuous by its absence.

We struggle to recall seeing Elliot Anderson having less involvement in a game of football in a double-pivot with Mateo Kovacic that simply did not function as either shield or launchpad.

Had this been a real game, it’s hard to think Arsenal wouldn’t have gone on to win more handsomely still rather than take the foot off the gas amid the obligatory Raft of Substitutions as the game ended at walking pace.

But by then Arsenal had made their point and City theirs.

What’s worth remembering about conclusions based on pre-season is that Arsenal are the one team among the Big Six where we don’t have to. Where we have something meaningful and tangible about the current set-up to go on.

Having the same manager as last season shouldn’t make you an outlier, but this year it does. Arsenal have all the same strengths as last season, and the tentative head-above-the-parapet prediction we’ll make after watching this game is that they are going to be less beholden to the more controversial weapons in their armoury this season.

Arsenal did what they felt they had to do to get a monkey off their back last season. This season they might also be here to play as well as win.