Inside Eberechi Eze and Mikel Arteta’s plan that allowed Arsenal to finally click | OneFootball

In the week before Eberechi Eze took charge of the north London derby, and electrified the fixture, he was actually supposed to be taking it a bit easier. The 27-year-old had been given two days off after international duty with England, but insisted on getting back to Arsenal’s London Colney training ground after just one. “He wants to learn,” Mikel Arteta beamed.

The Arsenal staff have been hugely excited about Eze’s evolution, but the description from the training ground over the past few months has been that he’s been a bit “tight” in his play. In other words, that he hasn’t yet felt fully relaxed in his role.

That perhaps isn’t surprising since Arteta’s tactical instructions are known to be complex, involving a lot of messages, and Eze did not have a pre-season with the club. That's a lot to register. Declan Rice similarly struggled in 2023, with staff believing he only went to another level after Christmas, when he had fully internalised his tactical demands. By contrast, one of many reasons that Arteta adores Jurrien Timber is because he got it all straight away. Max Dowman is said to be the same, but it’s understandably rare.

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‘Things happen for a reason’: Arteta was impressed with Eze’s impact (Action Images via Reuters)

A further challenge for Eze was that, at Crystal Palace, he’d been accustomed to being able to indulge himself as a playmaker without the same level of restrictions. He was the man.

Here, the general stance of Arteta’s staff is that, at this level, you have to be absolutely efficient with attacking touches. Otherwise, needless giveaways “let down the team structure”.

It was revealed in The Independent’s Inside Football on Friday that Arsenal have also been trying to coach him through a new left-sided attacking position, from where they can best release his creativity.

They started to see the impact on Sunday. The excited belief in the camp throughout the game and afterwards was that this was when it clicked for Eze.

Staff even purred about the nature of the third goal as illustrating that in illustrious fashion. There was such a smooth manner to Eze’s movement as he curled the ball into the top corner. The “tightness” had gone. He’d “dropped his shoulders”.

He’s in the groove.

There was similarly a striking moment shortly before that, when the game was feasibly still in the balance at 3-1. Eze tried to dribble through the centre of the Spurs midfield, only to lose the ball for a counter-attack.

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Eze wrote himself into Arsenal history by scoring his first senior hat-trick in a north London derby (Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

This is precisely what Arteta animatedly cautions against.

And yet even a coach as controlling as the Basque can surely appreciate the dual nature of this. It is the necessary risk of players who try something different, who elevate your game and give you greater reward.

Arteta certainly intimated this afterwards, even if it was amid the glow of victory. “At any moment he can win us a game, that’s the ability he has, and he wants to fulfil that talent.”

One obvious response some will have to that, especially amid current debates around Arsenal, is that Arteta is a coach who doesn’t necessarily facilitate talent in that way; that he is too restrained.

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Eze’s goals in the thumping win over Tottenham lifted Arsenal to six points clear of Chelsea (Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

Arsenal figures were only too happy to say that all of the goals in this 4-1 win came from open play. And that came from a team that had a lot of signings in the summer finally starting to integrate.

They point to the nature of the first goal, by Leandro Trossard, the only one that Eze didn’t score. Tottenham had gone man-for-man in their 5-4-1, specifically to track Rice and the rest of Arsenal’s midfielders.

That worked for a time but there are two problems with it. One is that it is exhausting, both physically and mentally. Two is that it only works if the opposition can’t open you up.

Arsenal had actually been playing the ball around for 90 seconds before that, to purposely move Spurs out of their system. Merino then had the glimpse of an opening and maximised it.

Eze then finally maximised his own potential, to do something that has barely been done in the history of this fixture. The 27-year-old became just the fourth player to score a hat-trick in the north London derby. The other names are Ted Drake in 1934, Terry Dyson in 1961 and Alan Sunderland in 1978.

It’s astonishing to think given some of the expressive free-scorers that have played in this game, from Jimmy Greaves through Ian Wright and Jurgen Klinsmann to Thierry Henry and Harry Kane.

Eze - not for the first or last time - has done something special.