Arsenal 2-1 Brighton: Gunners go back on top after another knife-edge game

Match report – Player ratings – Arteta reaction – Video

After Man City had won earlier in the day, in contentious fashion too, the pressure was on Arsenal to respond when Brighton came to visit. It’s perhaps a little strange to reference another game before ours, but I think this a big factor in how yesterday made me feel.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but I suspect many of you share the sentiment which is this: winning is great, but right now the process of winning is almost torturous. Arsenal are playing games on a knife-edge. It’s like watching your child walk a high-wire between two skyscrapers, with no safety net, and all you can do is hold your breath, say a little prayer if you’re that way inclined, and hope for the best.

This is what finishing second three times in a row does to you in this modern era. This is what competing against a side like Man City does to you, and it skews the way you think. City won with a late goal against Nottingham Forest and it feels like ‘Oh they are inevitable’, whereas we beat Brighton by the same scoreline and it feels as if somehow we’re lucky to get away with it.

Did David Raya save us the points with his incredible save? Almost certainly, and he deserves massive plaudits for what was a sensational piece of goalkeeping. But the reality is after that corner was blocked over by Piero Hincapie and we got a goal kick Brighton didn’t have a single shot, and in the final stages of the game we missed big chances to secure the points ourselves. Bukayo Saka set up Gabriel Martinelli who somehow skied over from 6 yards, before Saka himself looked a bit tired (and possibly offside) when he went through and was tackled by Lewis Dunk.

We miss too many chances, and Man City have Erling Haaland. Another aspect of the fear that is pervasive as we watch this Arsenal team struggle to score goals at the moment. They have one of the best strikers in the world, and we’re relatively deficient in that position right now. There were some signs that Viktor Gyokeres was a little more on the same wavelengths as those around him, but the way he fluffed his lines on his best chance early in the game seemed to sum up his time at Arsenal so far.

Gabriel Jesus is back and we’ve put a lot of hope that he can miraculously be the same player he was for four months back in the early part of the 2022-23 season. And soon Kai Havertz will return, maxed-out on the special sauce players have when they’ve been out injured and we hope we’ll get the best version of them when they play again. It’s a lot to ask of a man who hasn’t started a competitive game in almost a year. I think all three are options for us up front, and my 1-2-3 in terms of preference isn’t important, but I think Haaland’s reliability and prowess casts a dark shadow, like Mount Doom, over every game when our strikers don’t get on the scoresheet.

This game was tight in terms of scoreline, but on the pitch it was anything but. I thought Arsenal were very good in the first half, and deservedly ahead. Martin Odegaard looked like a man finding something like the form we know he’s capable of, and when Saka fed him in the 15th minute, his finish inside the near post was excellent. Much more like the Odegaard we all want to see. 15 shots in the first 45 minutes, Brighton had 0. They were out-played, out-fought in every aspect of the game, and we looked in charge.

The only thing was extending that scoreline. There were moments when it could have happened, but it took a second half own goal to do it. Perhaps lost in the analysis of the opposition scoring for us again (it’s 4 OGs in the last 4 games now, a bit mad), is how well Arsenal played to win that corner. We produced a lovely 19 pass move from midfield, across the back-line from right to left and back to right, Saka and Odegaard progressing it well through midfield, and Trossard eventually teeing up the captain for a shot which was blocked behind.

Rice delivered with real quality, Georginio Rutter flicked a header into his own net. 2-0 Arsenal. And from there we should have gone on and won that game more comfortably. There might be questions about substitutions, players we could have used but didn’t, and Brighton did respond with a period of pressure. Was it because we sat off to defend too deeply? Perhaps, but they hit the post, reacted quickest to the rebound and all of a sudden it was 2-1 and much less comfortable.

Welcome to Knife Edge, population: every Arsenal fan in the world. Mikel Arteta brought on fit again Gabriel and Gabriel Jesus for Myles Lewis-Skelly and Gyokeres, and I think that stabilised us. A bit more presence at the back, a bit more stickiness up top. The Raya save from Yankuba Minteh was incredible but also so, so important. I don’t think it’s impossible we might have scored again if that had gone in, but I’m very glad we didn’t have to go through that.

The Martinelli miss (HOW?!) really felt like the kind that would come back to haunt us, but it didn’t. 5 minutes of injury time that felt like 5 hours. That’s what it is when the stakes are high, when you’re fighting for a title. This is what we all wanted when we were stagnating in 8th place, a team that was competitive, that could challenge.

“YES BUT NOT LIKE THIS!”

I kid, but I think you know what I mean. I have to say, I thought Mikel Arteta looked more relaxed afterwards than I expected. Perhaps he views this differently than we do. A tight game against tough opposition in which we come out on top and take all three points. That’s the way of the Premier League. That said, by his own admission, the margin of victory should have been bigger, and he did feel that nervous energy in the crowd:

We all want to win so badly. Now I don’t want to lose what I have and we have to play to continue to score and show that composure and that ability, and we should have scored the third one. We have two massive chances to put it to 3-1, and then it would have been different. We haven’t, so we have to suffer a little bit more.

I do think the fact we’ve conceded late goals a few times lately also played a part, but overwhelmingly for me it’s about knowing that if you drop points in this league, it’s going to be really tough to make them up again. That’s not going to go away any time soon, so it’s something we’re going to have to deal with, although the players could make our lives easier by being a bit more clinical in front of goal.

In the cold light of day, this is a game I think we deserved to win. There were some big individual performances from the likes of Odegaard, Saka and Rice who, asked to fill in at right back, put in an outstandingly energetic display in a position he probably hasn’t played in since he was a kid. On every metric we were better than Brighton, and while we’re finding goals hard to come by, we’re looking to solve that problem from the best place possible: top of the Premier League. Worth acknowledging, now we turn our attention to Tuesday and the visit of Aston Villa.

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Right, I’m gonna leave it there for now, but stand-by for an Arsecast Extra in a little while. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server. The pod should be out around noon today.

For now, have a good one.