16 Conclusions: Rice and Saliba inspire Arsenal to conquer their Everest with victory over Man City

Manchester City beating Arsenal was one of the few constants one could rely on in this crazy world. Is nothing now sacred? Here are 16 Conclusions on a game whose football didn’t really merit them but whose potential significance absolutely does…

1) Twelve games and 2380 days since Arsenal avoided defeat in a Premier League game against Manchester City. Sixteen games and 2848 days since Arsenal beat Manchester City in a Premier League game.

There has been no more one-sided fixture between theoretical and (last season’s) very clearly direct rivals for the longest time. Arsenal had played well against City – often, in truth, better than they played here – but unable for years and years and years to emerge with so much as a point for their efforts.

Which makes this a hugely significant psychological blow in what already has the look of being a teak-tough title scrap between these two and very probably Liverpool and heaven help us all possibly even Tottenham, who go into the international break top of the bloody lot of them.

2) It’s a significant enough result almost to render the nature of it irrelevant. But in many ways that Arsenal achieved this result in the face of fairly significant adversity and with a non-vintage performance only amplifies its significance. There remains, even after this, a keen sense that Arsenal are yet to find anything like their ceiling this season and the only team currently above them are one riding an absurd and surely unsustainable banter wave.

The winning goal has a quite obvious element of fortune, but it was Arsenal at that stage who were the only team willing to buy a raffle ticket. The only team even trying to throw enough balls at enough coconuts to maybe with a bit of luck win a goldfish. Normally you’d make little of this; they were at home, after all. But given their record in this fixture the temptation to simply avoid defeat – an offer City had pretty tacitly made – must have been there. The Gunners didn’t exactly go all out for victory, but they were the team that offered any ambition at all in that regard during a second half of more tension than quality.

3) While the potential May significance of this result is enormous, this was by no means a classic. We’ve been spoiled by the Big Games this season, really. Arsenal-Spurs, Arsenal-United, Spurs-Liverpool, Newcastle-Liverpool. Maybe we’d almost forgotten these sorts of games generally disappoint as often as they delight. And as a game, this was a disappointment.

We already had proof of concept that City without Rodri and Kevin De Bruyne is Just Not The Same, and now for the first time since their return to the genuine elite we discovered what Arsenal are like without Bukayo Saka. He missed a Premier League game for the first time since May 2021, snapping an absurd 87-game streak, and even this most satisfactory of results won’t mask the extent to which he was missed.

There’s a reason Mikel Arteta feels utterly unable to leave him out and in his absence Arsenal’s attacks lacked a certain crispness and inventiveness. He really is something special, even if statistically the evidence is now clear that Arsenal are quite significantly better without him. Sample size, my foot.

4) Arsenal certainly missed Saka more in the first half than the second, though. Because in the second they had Gabriel Martinelli back in action and his impact was clear long before his speculative shot cannoned off Nathan Ake’s head and past a helplessly wrongfooted Ederson.

What he gave Arsenal was an injection of pace and excitement, a player willing to run in behind and stretch City’s previously unflustered and untroubled backline. Gabriel Jesus and Eddie Nketiah worked diligently but never truly convincingly. A draw always looked the likeliest result right up until it didn’t, but throughout the second half Martinelli always looked the likeliest man to make something happen.

5) This may not have been a game stuffed full of standout moments or performances, but those there were came almost exclusively from Arsenal. Declan Rice was immense in an all-round midfield performance that would be hard to top. We already know City’s midfield is not what it might be once shorn of De Bruyne and Rodri, but rare indeed is the day when comfortably the best midfielder on show in a City game isn’t wearing light blue.

Rice was dominant and diligent in his defensive work and increasingly influential going forward as Arsenal tightened their control of proceedings in the second half. He made three interceptions, two tackles, blocked a shot, completed 90% of his passes, played two key passes and put barely a foot wrong.

6) Rice’s only serious competition for man of the match came from one of the defenders whose lives he made so much easier than might have been anticipated. Arsenal’s entire defence, if not always their goalkeeper, looked remarkably assured and comfortable in keeping City at arm’s length throughout, but while all produced creditable displays it was William Saliba who stood out. City were poor, but Saliba was as close to faultless as anyone could ever be in a game of this size. He kept Erling Haaland not just quiet but utterly silent, and chucked in a 97% pass success for good measure.

He continues to go from strength to strength and his paramount significance in the transformation of a talented but flaky and too often brittle team into genuine title contenders over the last season and a bit makes him a worthy heir to Virgil van Dijk as the Premier League’s best centre-back.

7) City were desperately poor, though, in slumping to successive Premier League defeats for the first time since 2018. No matter how good Rice or Saliba or Martinelli or Gabriel Magalhaes may have been, no matter how City were without key players of their own, there really is no excuse to be this poor, this flat, this devoid of idea and imagination in such a potentially significant fixture.

This is a City team that coasted through the first six weeks of the season but what should have been a wake-up call at Wolves last week has turned into an extended snooze. Not even on their inexplicably cursed trips to the other side of north London have City ever looked quite so forlorn as they did here.

The second half was insipid beyond belief and no doubt contributed to the gradual and decisive growth in Arsenal’s belief and confidence that they could not only get something from the game but all three points. Even at 1-0 down, City offered almost nothing. After a first quarter of an hour that hinted at normal service they threw almost no punches at a team they have used as a punchbag for the last six years.

8) Erling Haaland, xG 0.00. I swear you’ll never see anything like this ever again. So watch it. Drink it in. His worst Premier League performance? Quite possibly. Apart from one little-eyebrows flick-on to create an early chance that Nathan Ake ballooned over the bar it’s hard to recall another meaningful contribution from the most lethal striker in Premier League history.

There’s praise of course for the way Arsenal’s defence handled him, but a performance this inert, this thoroughly devoid of life, can only be credited to the opponent so much. Haaland typified the sluggishness that plagued City all over the Emirates pitch.

9) It’s not a question that needed asking in the first six weeks of the season, but it feels significant now. Have City – largely unnecessarily – weakened themselves this season? There were and are cogent reasons for the individual exits of each of Ilkay Gundogan, Aymeric Laporte, Cole Palmer, Riyad Mahrez, Joao Cancelo. But it’s a lot of talent and in most of those cases experience to shed in a single window. All have been replaced, but how many with – in the short term at least – clear upgrades?

Arguably none. Is Guardiola yet again trying to find a way to win the Premier League on a harder difficulty setting? First he trains up Arsenal’s coach. Then he gives them a couple of battle-hardened winners to add steel to a squad of talented lightweights. Now he simply jettisons half a team for the sheer thrill of it. Just to feel alive.

10) What now for Kalvin Phillips? It is more accurate currently to describe him as an England and Manchester City player than a Manchester City and England one. With Rodri injured you’d surely expect this to be Phillips’ chance to state his case and prove himself worthy of a chance at City. Instead he now finds himself lower in the central-midfield pecking order than an 18-year-old right-back.

There are always going to be players who need a January move for multiple reasons, but Phillips currently sits right at the top of all such lists.

He’s 27. He cannot be playing this minuscule amount of football and relying on international football to keep his minutes up. And now City don’t even have the Carabao to keep him gainfully employed.

11) There wasn’t much bad news knocking around for Arsenal. We suspect they can even live with not quite managing to find a second goal to lift them above their neighbours and into top spot.

What was a concern, though, was the first-half performance of David Raya. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Mikel Arteta’s bold ‘two number ones’ strategy – one it’s worth noting Brighton boss Roberto De Zerbi is replicating with dodgier results but far less attention – it is creating tension where they need not be tension. Raya had a poor game in midweek and carried that into this one. He was lucky to avoid giving a goal away when Julian Alvarez pounced on him early on but sent his block narrowly wide of the post, and that was only the most high-profile of his assorted antics in that opening 25 minutes. That he came so close to being picked off even with City at their least threatening is a concern and on another day his could easily have been a costly afternoon indeed for Arsenal.

There was another scare early in the second half but he finally settled down after that. He gets credit for that, but as with so very much about this match there’s at least equal criticism of City for allowing it. They really were quite disarmingly poor in that second half.

12) Now let’s talk as sadly we must these days about someone who shouldn’t even have been on the pitch for the second half. Whatever your allegiance there should perhaps be a sense of some relief that Arsenal got a late winner because there will now be far less attention on Mateo Kovacic’s baffling first-half escape. A lesson there that Liverpool might want to heed; when on the wrong end of officiating injustice it’s much better if you just still go right ahead and get a result anyway. Easier for all of us, not least because Spurs fans would also currently be ever so slightly quieter.

13) Kovacic’s red-card avoidance, though, was yet another reminder after last week that The Dreaded VAR can never be what it was promised to be. Consistency is an impossible and foolish dream when football’s laws contain so many unavoidable shades of grey. One man’s violent conduct is another man’s honest mistimed challenge. It’s futile comparing decisions week on week because they’re made by different humans and so many of them are subjective.

Futile, but irresistible. How can you not compare Kovacic’s yellow-card offence to Curtis Jones’ upgraded red-card offence last week. The similarities are too obvious and the divergence of outcome too significant. For what it’s worth – and that’s not really very much – we felt this was a worse foul. Unlike Jones, Kovacic’s angle of approach gave him no chance of winning the ball, and he lacked the mitigation of glancing contact with the ball to shape the eventual contact with his opponent’s leg. Kovacic was out of control, his studs were out. Was it an absolutely clear-cut definite red? No. Would a red card have been fair enough? Yes. It was, like Jones last week, One Of Those. Sometimes they get given, sometimes they don’t. But if you want consistency, you’re absolutely dreaming. In a way, we got the final and conclusive evidence of that from just about the least controversial decision at Tottenham last weekend; Diogo Jota’s second yellow card, deemed this week by the independent panel to be the wrong decision by three votes to two. Even the decision nobody really argued with split an expert panel 60-40.

What is beyond doubt here, though, is that, having collected that first yellow card, it was astonishing to see Kovacic avoid a second booking for clattering Declan Rice minutes later – VAR of course unable to intervene on this occasion BECAUSE RULES – and more astonishing still to see him emerge for the second half despite presumably being on ice thinner than a gnat’s cock hair. For 22 minutes Pep Guardiola played chicken with Michael Oliver before eventually removing Kovacic from the scene.

14) That’s enough of that unpleasantness. Back to the game and a result that Arsenal just about deserved for just about showing a smidgeon more ambition and belief than their bafflingly passive and routinely contained and controlled opponents. Arsenal broke new ground in the post-Wenger world with last season’s legit title challenge. They’ve done so again with victory over the team that has been their Everest. On this evidence, we wouldn’t want to be Bayern Munich if they come up against Arsenal in the Champions League.

15) But what does it all mean? In the end, it may well be absolutely nothing. Manchester City winning a fifth title in six years and unprecedented fourth English crown in a row remains by far the likeliest outcome this season. But there’s no point pretending things haven’t been shaken up a little by the last couple of weeks.

Ten days ago we were more certain than ever that Manchester City would win the league, but had no clue what might happen from second down to about eighth. We still have no clue about that, but now we’re also not sure about City. For entertainment value alone, that has to be good news for the league if not for City. We know Arsenal are capable of a title run; they are not playing as well or as thrillingly as they did for much of last season but they have improved the squad. Their floor and ceiling are both higher now than they were last year. Liverpool have got themselves into it when having to rebuild an entire midfield threatened to undermine their challenge before it began. Spurs are an entirely unknown quantity; they probably fade away but there’s something deliciously paradoxical about the fact that one of the chief arguments against them doing so is belief they may have derived from watching Arsenal’s unexpectedly prolonged title challenge last year. If you can see it, you can be it.

This was not the best game of football we’ve seen this season. But for its own significance and what it might mean for the weeks and months ahead we would argue strongly it’s the most important game of the season so far. Let’s be real, we’re eight games in. The title race hasn’t even started yet. But an Arsenal win here has teed it all up absolutely beautifully.

16) Which means it’s an absolutely perfect time for another international break.