16 Conclusions from Arsenal 2-1 Chelsea: corners, red cards, Declan Rice, Reece James, Robert Sanchez | OneFootball

Arsenal have spent recent weeks beating some daft sides quite easily, but also drawing too many games they ought to have won. For large chunks of this game against Chelsea, it looked like it might be another example of the latter.

Instead it marked a welcome return of something Arsenal had completely lost: the seemingly simple yet deceptively elusive art of just getting a win across the line.

It’s as you were at the head of a title race that looks set to go the distance.

1. After yesterday’s 3pm goal frenzy today saw a return to more normal scoring, but with its own oddity. Four games, four 2-1 home wins. We think it’s the first time any day containing four or more Premier League games has ended with the same scoreline in every single one. We think.

Others were important for the mere bagatelles of Champions League qualification or relegation-condemning. This one feels monumental for the title race.

This was a win of a sort you just felt like Arsenal needed at this time; getting over the line in a tough game against a tough opponent who were only occasionally rather than consistently idiotic. It hasn’t happened in recent weeks.

Since the turn of the year, Arsenal have been either winning comfortably against fools, or coming a cropper. Often also against fools. This was only the Gunners’ fifth Premier League win from 10 Premier League games this year; the other four had been 4-1, 4-0, 3-0 and 4-1 again.

Those wins are fine and dandy, of course, but you can’t win the title with them alone. Not often, anyway. You need to win the other, tighter games. Four draws in very winnable games and a home defeat to a Man United team rendered inevitable by Michael Carrick wasn’t disastrous, but it wasn’t getting the job done either.

Today, Arsenal got the job done.

2. Another big tick for Arsenal is the renewed and restored ability to recover after giving up a lead. Because a feature of those disappointing results had been the failure to complete the job. Arsenal had dropped seven points from winning positions since January 25 having previously only once failed to win in a game they’d led – November’s 2-2 draw at Sunderland.

But that’s now two weekends in a row when Arsenal have conceded a frustrating against-the-run-of-play equaliser without it costing them in the end, and today’s win carries that extra weight from not coming against a team that can and will lose to itself pretty much every week right now.

3. And what a Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal win it was, too. All three goals came from corners. All four of Arsenal’s starting back four ended the game credited with a goal or an assist, and let’s not worry too much that Piero Hincapie’s was an own goal from an Arsenalesque taste-of-their-own-medicine Reece James delivery.

Arsenal caused Chelsea trouble all afternoon from set-pieces and it’s no secret that this is a huge part of the Gunner’s armoury. But the way so many want it downplayed or ridiculed won’t do.

There are a great many ways of scoring goals that can look easy. But if they were actually as easy as their best exponents make them look, everyone would do it. But not everyone has players capable of Declan Rice’s delivery or Gabriel Magalhaes, William Saliba and Jurrien Timber’s collective ability to multiply the chaos once the ball arrives.

The opening goal was the platonic ideal of an Arsenal goal, with one centre-back creating a mismatch at the back post to tee up the other.

4. There was an odd eagerness on the part of the Sky commentary team to take the goal off Saliba and make it an own goal. We think it was because Peter Drury had a stat about Arsenal benefiting from own goals and he was determined to use it.

This one was clearly not an own goal, but it also wouldn’t matter if it was. When your plan revolves around chaos generation from expertly delivered set-pieces, own goals are baked in to the entirely acceptable and predictable potential outcomes.

And happily enough, Chelsea’s equaliser proved the point better than we could have hoped as James’ wicked delivery left Hincapie trusting to luck with where his attempt to do all he could to repel the danger. On this occasion, that luck deserted him.

5. We are in any case entirely certain there will be a dramatic reduction in set-piece-based grumbling and Proper Footballing when Declan Rice and Reece James’ corners and free-kicks propel Thomas Tuchel’s England to World Cup glory. Which after today looks basically guaranteed.

6. It must, though, be noted that Arsenal were aided and abetted by some Chelsea nonsense, as has become their wont in recent weeks.

Most conspicuously throughout the afternoon, this came from Robert Sanchez. He remains a goalkeeper powerfully allergic to a solid 7/10 performance and insistent only on either brilliance or terrifyingly cavalier incompetence.

The thing we find most rattling about Sanchez is the way any error or moment of uncertainty is almost certain to be followed by another as he strives desperately to show everyone how little he has let the previous mistake get to him.

“Look guys,” he seems to say, “Marvel upon my calmness, witness how unfazed I am by that earlier mistake,” as he repeats the exact same mistake and gives possession away unnecessarily to a team that needs no second invitation.

7. We’re not saying we think goalkeepers should spend the entire 90 minutes of a football match in a state of dread panic, but we don’t trust ones who make this kind of great show of outward-presenting calm. There’s no way it’s real, and even if it is then it just suggests a lack of understanding of their situation.

The sight of Sanchez making light of an Ebere Eze attempt to catch him off his line was particularly disconcerting, and ended with Chelsea’ keeper entirely unnecessarily taking the ball out of play for what should have been a corner.

Yet with the assistant referee necessarily caught upfield, Sanchez got away with it. Very possibly as a direct result of looking so innocent. So maybe he’s right. Then again, in the second half he got pinged for a corner when the ball hadn’t in fact gone behind, with the officials having presumably realised at half-time the earlier mistake. So maybe he’s wrong again after all.

And maybe none of it means anything. Maybe it’s all just a bunch of stuff that happened.

8. While we’re on the subject of Chelsea stupidity – which we were, please keep up – let’s get to Pedro Neto. He is very much not the only offender, but “Chelsea are playing quite well, so here comes a ridiculous red card” is becoming too much of a trope to ignore. Especially as one could, if one were so inclined, extend that further to “Chelsea are playing quite well against Arsenal, so here comes a ridiculous red card”.

9. That is, absurdly, Chelsea’s seventh red card of this Premier League season. One every four games. For a team that finds itself just outside the Champions League places, that’s a maddening self-inflicted handicap to overcome and leaves them on course to at least match and quite possibly beat the current Premier League season record of nine jointly held by the 2009/10 Sunderland and 2011/12 QPR sides.

Worth noting also that those teams finished 13th and 17th in their seeing-red seasons; this is not a record Champions League-chasers should be contending for.

And this season, nobody else comes close at all. Everton have had four red cards, while relegation battlers West Ham, Wolves and Spurs have all had three (and the latter have some mitigation here anyway because they have red-card-magnet Cristian Romero as captain). The other 15 members of the league have no more than two and in five cases – including both Arsenal and Man City – none at all.

Which hammers home the key point. Chelsea are not only out on their own as the worst offenders among all-comers here, but even further out of step with their direct rivals. The five teams above Chelsea in the table have only amassed three red cards between them, as well as significantly fewer bookings – a metric where Chelsea rank below only Tottenham, Brighton and Bournemouth.

10. There is a lot to unpack in Neto’s pair of quick-fire yellow cards. First and most obviously, another reminder of just how boneheaded it is to get booked for dissent. You are quite literally asking for trouble.

That Neto’s first caution came in protest at Arsenal’s second goal in which he and several of his team-mates had been momentarily hoodwinked by the hero of the hour Sanchez into believing he hadn’t just made a giant bollocks of dealing with another Arsenal corner and had in fact been fouled.

We would love to see Neto’s reaction when he eventually got to see the replay of the ‘offence’ for which he earned the first of his two cautions.

11. But the reason it’s so silly to get an entirely avoidable booking is because it leaves you hostage to (mis)fortune when faced with the prospect of the unavoidable booking.

And for Neto, that harsh lesson came all too quickly. Chelsea went from 1-1 and right in the game on 66 minutes to a goal and a man down by 70 minutes.

Gabriel Martinelli launched Arsenal into a quick break that absolutely called for precisely the sort of cynical, deliberate yellow-card offence we all know and love. Your classic ‘the ball can get past, the player can get past, but not both’.

The problem for Chelsea was the player required to administer it. Neto, stymied by his own foolishness moments earlier, dilly-dallied for a crucial second, torn between what must be done and the now graver consequences.

The upshot was that by the time, with an air of resignation, he made the necessary foul it didn’t even really work. Martinelli was able to scramble back to his feet and would’ve been away had the official not been obliged to pull play back to give the most straightforwardly inevitable of second yellow cards.

12. As a small aside, that was an irritating theme of the afternoon. While the brandishing of a second yellow trumps all but the most immediate of scoring opportunities, there were plenty of other far less explicable and far more irritating insistences on blowing the whistle when the game could have been allowed to go on.

Not once but twice Arsenal saw promising second-half counter-attacks halted by play being unnecessarily called back for fouls as Raya looked to get Arsenal moving.

This was not an easy game to referee, but it’s hard to say Darren England did a particularly good job of it. Anyone can get a big decision wrong, but it’s more jarring somehow – and suggests a more general lack of control – to see a series of more minor, niggling errors. Especially given their repetitive nature. He must have known he’d mildly f*cked up after the first Arsenal advantage he missed, which makes the second failure even harder to stomach.

13. It didn’t matter much as it turned out, but Arsenal could also have very easily conceded a penalty at the end of the first half when Declan Rice clambered all over Jorrel Hato before raising an elbow that sent the ball spinning towards the Arsenal goal.

Raya, battling his way through a crowd of blue and red shirts, did spectacularly well to prevent an own goal, but VAR’s insistence that Rice could not be punished because he was involved in a physical tussle he himself had instigated seemed unsatisfactory.

Perhaps luckily for us all, with the possible exception of Hincapie, the corner Raya conceded would prove to be the one from which Chelsea scored and thus discourse was averted. Apart from this tiny bit of it here but don’t worry: nobody reads this far down the 16 Conclusions.

14. Raya made another fine save that did count for rather more at the very end of the second half from one of those goalkeeper nightmare crosses that they know are sneaking inside their far post, but for which they cannot safely move until the ball has evaded any further touch from friend or for along its way.

If this win proves to be as important as we suspect it might, then it becomes a key moment for the season. And this time Chelsea’s resulting corner was trash.

15. There were plenty of reasons why this game became in large part a set-piece battle – and a whistle-happy ref was definitely a big one – but for the opening 15 minutes and again at the start of the second half, a very different kind of game did appear possible.

Chelsea, Sanchez apart, started brightly in both halves. In the first, Cole Palmer was able to cause significant problems by dropping into midfield space and dictating from there.

But one of Arsenal’s great defensive strengths is their ability to quickly cotton to problems like this and address them. For a short while, William Saliba took to man-to-man marking Palmer, almost following him around the field and ensuring he wouldn’t keep being able to receive the ball in the space he’d enjoyed early on.

The momentum of Chelsea’s start was soon absorbed and Arsenal were able to take control until an equaliser that came as a significant shock.

16. Perhaps in part because of that late mood-shifter in the first half, Chelsea enjoyed another fine start to the second, with Joao Pedro managing to up the nuisance value and keep Arsenal’s defenders honest and engaged.

Again, though, the visitors could not sustain it before a familiar Arsenal strength and a familiar Chelsea weakness kicked in again in game-settling quick succession.

Arsenal appear to have put their wobble behind them and are once again keeping Man City at bay, but Chelsea have gone off the boil at an inopportune moment. A couple of careless draws and now this defeat have set up Wednesday’s clash against a similarly-stuttering Aston Villa as a pretty significant one.