By Merl
December 19 2025

This was written a few weeks ago and has been updated to show our recent form. We had umpteen clean sheets, ten goals from set-pieces and consecutive wins until Sunderland, Villa and Chelsea put a spoke in our wheel. What stopped our winning momentum?

I believe Mikel Arteta “Safety First” Football has yet to resolve these two fatal phases, namely:
#1 – Cold Start and Lack of Penetration
#2 – Second Half Safety First Football

During the 2022/23 season, we had  a flying start often scoring within 20 minutes during early part of the season. But managers started to wise-up on ArtetaBall, and devised effective countermeasures which Arteta had no answer to it. Goals started to dry up.

That was what happened against Sunderland when we started tentatively, and Sunderland got a lucky break. Noticing that both Rice and Zubimendi have poor body shape when shielding the ball under pressure, they put Ballard as an extra centre-forward and got lucky with Rice’s poor body shape, brushed Rice aside and scored. Arteta did not heel Etihad Stadium Lesson when Pep deployed Stone as an extra centre-forward who scored the equalizer during 98th minute.

ArtetaBall requires players to press intelligently, with one man pressuring the opponent on the ball and others cutting off passing angles into opponents. From the first whistle, players need to press the ball carrier intensely, and to pile players into the immediate vicinity of the player in possession, almost crowding him out through intimidation. But Arsenal players did not do that, sitting back and let their opponents to attack them, feeling them out and after 20 or 30 minutes, started to move into gear and move into final third to dominate possession.

Arsenal play a high line, focusing on vertical compactness and horizontal compactness, frequently regained possession by boxing in teams in their final third. But teams are wised to it, ceding possession at the flanks to Arsenal, and invited Arsenal to attack their low blocks.

Compacting the horizontal line means that Arsenal players found little space nor spotting passing channels as they are cluttered together executing short 5-metre or less passes without penetration or easily anticipated and cleared.
And why Arsenal relies on set-pieces rather than open play to score.

We are lucky with this momentarily success, still leading the Table despite having four senior attacking players out for months and Gyokeres may be out for a few more weeks.

Perhaps with the return of Madueke, Havertz, Odegaard and Martinelli, Arteta can resolve this “cold start” issue with high intense football from the first whistle, never allow their opponents to settle down to attack them.

The Second Fatal Flaw is that whenever we go into the lead at half-time, we always came out in the second half, playing Safety First Football, inviting opponents to attack us with the threat of our quick counter-attacks once we won the ball. Apparently, Arteta has yet to learn the bitter lessons of previous season when leading 2-0, sitting back and ended up with a few 2-2 draws that were fatal to our title challenge. And yet again, we were punished by Sunderland, when they equalized during 94th minute.

This fatal flaw will be our downfall in the title race, complacency, arrogance in our defence solidity and just sitting back on our lead, and again, relying on counter-attacks and set-pieces to score again. Counter-attacks exposed our high line with only two defenders at the centre circle. We were lucky so far when caught out but the danger is Zubimendi lack of pace and poor body shape with opponents tend to run pass him and yellow card for pulling down or blatant bodycheck to stop quick opponent. It is a matter of time for Zubimendi to be suspended before the 19th game.

I blame Arteta Safety First Football during 2nd half to protect the lead, confidence in our defensive unit and to score another goal via counter-attack. Arteta is scarred by previous seasons’ dramatic collapse when his limited squad were physically and mentally exhausted during last quarter of the season, and his solution is to retreat into the shell during second half to conserve energy and legs.

But he has the squad with quality reserves, proven during current bright start even with three or four quality players out of the team for the past three months. He should learn the Sunderland Lesson that he cannot instruct his team to let the foot off the pedal during second half but must continue to press intensely and aggressively to win possession, pinning opponents in the final third, and to score form open plays.

Solve these two fatal phases and we will win the title with our “invulnerable” defence,  it would prove that our bright start of the season is not a momentarily success but can be sustained for a long period of time.