If you’d have offered me a Desmond 2-2 in the morning yesterday when I was writing my pre match thoughts, I’d have bitten your hands off. If you’d have told me that Arsenal would get back in the game after the first 10 – 15 minutes of yesterday’s game at the soulless Etihad I’d have been delighted. But even now, even with some of the talking points and the context of how the game panned out yesterday, It’s hard not to be bitterly disappointed in not getting the win yesterday against 115 Charges FC.

Arteta decided to have a little shuffle of his pack from the midweek game against Atalanta and, given that we had one less game and had to travel up to Manchester having played our third away game in a row (City were playing their third at home – funny that), clearly he felt he needed to freshen it up. But I also think he made his team selections based specifically on the threat of City:

  • Timber is proving himself to be a duel monster and so would be pitted up against the tricky winger Doku
  • Calafiori has been impressing in cameos and with Timber shifting to wide right (Ben White also not 100% fit) he was the natural choice
  • Gabriel Jesus hadn’t been great against Atalanta from the start and is still coming back in to fitness, so Trossard was preferred with Havertz also occupying the right eight position

And for those first 15 minutes I feared we were going to get an absolute battering. City start well, they pressed us high and hard, we looked like we weren’t settling in and then on eight minutes Calafiori was turned by Savio and his passed split our centre halves and Haaland did what he does and put City ahead.

And for about 10 minutes after that we continued to look a little shell-shocked as City had control. Our attacking players weren’t in the game, Havertz and Saka misplaced a few passes, as did Thomas Partey and for me personally, I was waiting for the standard City second goal to turn this in to a slow creeping death to the final whistle.

Except this Arsenal team write different scripts to their predecessors. Martinelli’s cut back to Calafiori enabled the Italian to glide in to striking the ball with such a level of confidence that if you didn’t know what position he played, you’d think he was an attacking midfielder. It was a weird old finish; I described it on social media as being like a six-a-side type goal that you score with your mates. Side foot, curler, not hit too hard but precision that was worthy of dragging us back in to the game. City might have had some fair complaints because Michael Oliver called Kyle Walker over to chat to him before the ball was sprayed to Martinelli in space, but given that Martinelli checked back in and Walker had got to him by the time he cut it back to Calafiori, I’m not sure about that. I suppose he might argue that they wouldn’t have played the ball to him if Walker was standing next to him, but that’s semantics.

The game settled in to an interesting rhythm then, because we looked more confident and started to pop the ball around a little better. Rodri, who had gone down within 10 seconds for a bit of gamesmanship went off injured, whilst City were clearly trying to ruffle us a little bit. Haaland had gone bouldering in to Saliba early on to ‘let him know he was there’ and there was a little needle between both sides. Then we came to the first bit of stoppage time drama. Firstly, the good, from an Arsenal perspective. Gabriel had gone close a few minutes before from a corner, but once again he was the main target. Only this time as opposed to Doku marking him, it was Walker. And what’s interesting about his approach was that I saw what Walker did to Gabriel – that weird tappy thing – last season at the Emirates. He did that to Martinelli a few times at our ground and whilst it’s clearly designed to put players off, this time Gabriel, dropped his shoulder, lost walker and then powered us ahead. A brilliant goal and another one for Set Piece FC.

All we had to do now was hold out until half time. Step forward Michael Oliver. Point number one – Arsenal are in the spotlight with delaying restarts right now, so Trossard probably should have known better. Point number two – there was literally a second between the whistle and his kick. Point number three – Doku had kicked the ball away before this incident and Bernardo Silva had also flicked the ball away to delay a restart. Point number four – Michael Oliver refereed Liverpool two weekends ago when Dominik Szoboszlai kicked the ball away at Anfield after the whistle and given no yellow card. We’re back here again, aren’t we? Give me consistency and this morning I am telling you that Trossard is a silly boy. But we get none of it. From the same referee across different weeks, from the same referee across different matches. This is also the referee who chose not to ‘interfere’ when it came to Kovacic’s reckless challenge when already on a yellow card at The Emirates. The Howard Webb PR show was trotted out a year ago – see the below video for your evidence – to explain how Michael Oliver doesn’t want to impact that game. But he was happy to here. He was happy to when it was Arsenal on the receiving end, not City. For two season’s in a row. Interesting that, eh?

I don’t want players sent off for stuff like that, but if we’re going to be consistent, then do it. There seem to be different rules for different people. Also – Bernardo Silva was on the floor about to get treatment for the Trossard section yellow, so I’m not sure how Trossard was delaying the restart.

I’m not biting on the media narrative and the narrative of the City players about the second half and ‘only one team came to play’. Only one team had the ‘letter of the law’ applied to them equally. You don’t go an entire second half against 115 Charges FC and leave yourselves open, so it was a heroic rear guard action approach that was our only opportunity. And City struggled to break our excellent defence down until the last seconds of the game. But City got their equaliser in that last second and it was just a shame that we just switched off for that split second on the corner and the ball fortunately fell to John Stones to get them the point they will feel they deserve.

And ultimately, in the cold light of today, I’m going to look at this as a positive because we all said this start to the season was really tough and I’ll be honest, I thought we might be on maybe eight or nine points by now. As it stands we’re on 11, we’ve played three really tough away trips and got them out of the way, we now go in to a period of fixtures in which we’ll need to find answers and goals because the upcoming matches will be ones that we should be looking at as winnable fixtures.

If you fancy a post match watch of the Same Old Arsenal pod that James and I did last night, you can do so here. Otherwise I’ll be back tomorrow as we prepare for Bolton.

Have yourselves a good one folks.