16 Conclusions from Chelsea 2-2 Arsenal: A bad day for goalkeepers apart from Aaron Ramsdale
Chelsea and Arsenal played out a vaguely curious 2-2 draw at a soaked Stamford Bridge in a game that probably was strange enough to be remembered for things going wrong with outfield players’ hands and goalkeepers’ feet.
1) That is definitely two points dropped by Chelsea and a huge bonus point for Arsenal. The Gunners know from last season just how tight the margins are when embarking on a title battle with Manchester City; almost any game that isn’t a win goes down as a negative.
But there are exceptions. And those exceptions absolutely include games where you end up with a point despite being wildly outplayed for 75 minutes in the pissing rain while your goalkeeper has a deeply unpleasant spell of the jitters in the second half that sends you 2-0 down and should have sent you 3-0 down. In those games, it’s definitely still a point gained, a difficult fixture ticked off and the unbeaten record maintained.
2) And that’s particularly true given the perils of this particular fixture and what’s to come. The Gunners face all three promoted sides as well as Brentford and Wolves within their next six league games. Burgling a point here from a disappointing performance in conditions that were difficult for multiple reasons is absolutely fine. They remain, along with Liverpool, the likeliest team to give City anything too serious to think about further down the line in this season
3) However, this was still a disappointing performance in so many ways from Arsenal. Fielding what might be termed a first-choice front three of Saka, Jesus and Martinelli for the first time this season, they created precious little for huge swathes of the game, while a defence that so expertly shackled Erling Haaland and co. a fortnight ago was stretched and strained by a team with no real striker to speak of for most of the evening. We’ll get to the goalkeeping in due course, because let’s be honest it wasn’t great on either side, but Arsenal’s problems here did not begin and end with David Raya.
4) It has, though, been quite the day for Aaron Ramsdale. The England goalkeeper was absent from the bench here after his wife gave birth to their first child. If that didn’t prompt him to spark up a fat cigar, he must have been reaching for his lighter when Raya got lost in his own six-yard box three minutes into the second half.
Goals like Mudryk’s, a shanked cross that looped almost apologetically into the Arsenal net, can catch out even the most cautiously-positioned keeper. But Raya cannot put this one down to misfortune. His bearings, presumably, remained in the dressing room after the break.
The Spaniard was at least three yards too close to Mudryk – he was beyond his front post upon the Ukrainian’s mis-hit cross – and perhaps two yards further from his line than he ought to have been. Arteta appreciates Raya’s proactive approach and perhaps a desire to defend the space between his goal and his retreating defence was a factor in his flawed positioning, but sometimes a goalkeeper just needs to retreat and react. Raya wasn’t positive, he just looked p*ssed.
5) He still wasn’t thinking clearly when, shortly after, he passed the ball straight to Cole Palmer, who should not have given Raya the chance to scramble a recovery. If Arteta is serious about substituting keepers and Ramsdale had been available, Raya’s number would surely have gone up.
This was the third of a string of shaky performances from Raya, and if Ramsdale isn’t back in the Arsenal goal in midweek, then perhaps he never will be. But, with dual No.1s, the problem isn’t solved, it’s just shifted. Ramsdale will find himself under exactly the same pressure Raya is struggling to cope with.
6) Misery loves company, so Raya will have been chuffed to see Bob Sanchez struggle similarly in the Chelsea goal as the Blues failed to hold their two-goal lead.
The Spaniard was shaky throughout the second half, his most notable slip gifting Rice an open-ish goal to halve the deficit. Sanchez misplaced a 12-yard pass into Enzo Fernandez, who didn’t appear enthused to receive it. Conor Gallagher didn’t anticipate the mix-up; Rice did, and duly completed one of the least straightforward open-goal finishes you’ll see as he swept the ball first time into the corner as Chelsea’s keeper desperately tried to get back home.
Mercifully for Sanchez, there isn’t another keeper at Chelsea breathing down his neck. But Pochettino and every other coach who insists their No.1s moonlight as No.10s have to accept the risk that comes with whatever reward they are chasing.
7) Sanchez had another second-half moment when he came for a cross, got absolutely nowhere near the ball but cleaned out two or three of his own players as well as, more importantly for our point, Gabriel Jesus. We’ve never really understood why goalkeepers in particular but players in general have such carte blanche for late challenges in the penalty area as long as a player is able to “get a shot away”. It doesn’t work that way anywhere else on the field. Late tackles do not go unpunished because someone “got a pass away” or “got a clearance away”. It’s also objectively more dangerous than a lot of routinely penalised and criticised foul play, yet generally passes with little or no comment.
Given the things penalties can be awarded for in your modern football these days, this seems an obvious next front for us all to explore. Maybe when it happens to Liverpool. Because there really is no justifiable reason why a keeper especially but also any player at all should just be allowed to careen into opponents without any semblance of control or getting within the same postcode as the ball.
8) While the goalkeepers ultimately became the game’s defining figures, it was the make-up of the two attacks that drew early attention. Arsenal with that front three in situ for the first time, and Chelsea with a strikerless set-up that saw Palmer tasked with the central role and Raheem Sterling out on the right. It nearly drew instant dividend but for a misplaced pass from Palmer that went behind instead of into the winger’s run.
But Arsenal’s defence was confused by it all. Say what you like about Erling Haaland, but he does give you an obvious point of threat to think about as a defence. Chelsea’s policy of throwing defenders off the scent by having almost no viable goalscorer on the pitch at all is almost genius. And there was certainly something amusing about a player who until a couple of months ago was a promising youngster at City giving the Gunners so much more strife than the champions managed before the international break. Especially when you throw Sterling into that particular mix.
9) Both were involved in giving Chelsea a 1-0 half-time lead they deserved on balance of play, but the nature of which was inevitably controversial. We don’t want to spend all night talking about it because lord knows we’re all bored of VAR chat now, but it really does feel like the game has moved a long way beyond the original concept of several laws and we’re really not sure the toothpaste can be put back in the tube. Handball was not introduced for offences like William Saliba’s, in which Mudryk heads the ball into his arm from no more than a yard away.
Saliba’s crime here really is in having been caught slightly off guard and slightly out of position by the cross and Mudryk’s run, but the punishment for it feels so perversely excessive.
We’re also way past the point where people should be talking about natural or unnatural positions. There is absolutely nothing unnatural about the position of Saliba’s arm as he moves his body at high speed. Arms go up and out when we do that. But what he did do was make his silhouette bigger, and really that’s all that matters now. Common sense says this isn’t a penalty, but if all we want is consistency then on balance this season it absolutely is. It was consistent with the one given in the Merseyside derby earlier in the day, and frankly that’s already at the absolute limit of what can reasonably be asked for.
Arsenal themselves have certainly benefited from such an interpretation of the handball law this season and maybe it does all even out in the end. Doesn’t mean we have to start liking these decisions when we see them.
10) But the problem remains that consistency – and common sense, really – are impossible and unreachable targets. Short of making handball a strict liability offence akin to getting hit on the boot in hockey (and we’re pretty sure absolutely nobody wants that) it’s almost impossible to craft a handball law that allows consistency across every decision. Handball is one of those offences that people will never truly agree on, and even as we watch them it’s so often based on feels and subjective nuance.
We’d imagine – and such is the nature of these things expect to be proved instantly wrong here – that a sizeable majority of football fans would be at least slightly uncomfortable with the penalty given against Saliba here but that a similar majority would look at, say, Scott McTominay’s penalty concession at Sheffield United and go yes, that’s a penalty. There are things about the two specific cases that are easy to note as you watch them, but harder to draft in an all-encompassing manner for a law. McTominay’s arm, for instance, is far closer to his body than Saliba’s. But it’s in a far less natural position for the movement he’s making towards a ball travelling from much further away.
We could all point at that and go “Yes, penalty” and Saliba’s and go “No, not a penalty” but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.
11) And look, now we have talked about it all night. Which is exactly what we didn’t want to happen. So let’s make two other observations about that penalty. One, it was coolly converted by Palmer who is having an eye-catching time of it right now. Two, that happened only after a fairly visible disagreement over precisely who should take the penalty, a disagreement only settled apparently by Enzo Fernandez alpha-ing his way over and casting a deciding vote for Palmer.
We are as always absolutely staggered that a professional football team can win a penalty in the 11th minute of a match and not have a clearly defined and established protocol in place for which bloke is taking it. This feels like such an easily solved problem for such a common yet vital situation, and yet time and again we see it play out. Make it make sense.
12) There really was very little evidence to support an imminent Arsenal comeback until Sanchez, Fernandez, Gallagher and Rice combined to such astonishing effect. The Gunners had been second best all over the pitch, caught out by Chelsea’s tactics, and made the conspicuous individual mistakes. But it says an awful lot about Arsenal – and in fairness right now also Chelsea – that from the moment Rice so expertly swept that loose ball into the unguarded but distant net you never thought for a moment they wouldn’t come up with an equaliser and quite possibly also a winner.
Arteta’s achievements and successes at Arsenal are increasingly notable, but that shift is perhaps the most significant. They have become almost absurdly difficult to beat and a team that don’t just frequently save themselves but that you now fully expect to do so again and again and again. That simply hasn’t been true of any Arsenal side – even some quite good ones – for a decade or more.
13) And a fine equaliser it was too, albeit one that was once again assisted by a baffling individual error. Malo Gusto looks to see where Leandro Trossard is not once but twice before Bukayo Saka whips over the most overtly Bukayo Saka whipped cross in history to find Trossard exactly where Gusto had left him and yet to the Chelsea right-back’s apparent extreme surprise. Trossard’s finish was a delightfully clever one, but the chance to apply it without even a modicum of pressure from his marker was a surprising one.
The whole thing was yet another reminder too of why Arteta is so keen at all times to have Saka on the pitch for every single minute of every single game if at all possible. Even on a quiet evening for him – and this was that – he remains capable of delivering those moments of greatness. There’s been a lot of chat about certain other English youngsters over the international break, and with good reason, but let’s not forget how very exciting it is that we’ve also got a decade of Saka to look forward to as well.
14) One point gained from a trying evening for Arsenal, then. But what of Chelsea? It’s a point that means recent momentum doesn’t completely stall, but it should have been three. They’ll retain their place at the top of the xG table with a flawless record but having only a Palmer penalty (dubious in nature) and Mudryk’s freakish goal (enormously welcome as it may have been for club and player) does rather highlight the problem here.
Chelsea’s issues aren’t entirely of their own making, but watching a team that possesses so many ways to trouble the opposition but apparently so few ways to actually hurt them is immensely frustrating.
15) And on that note it was a disappointing performance off the bench from Nicolas Jackson. The closest thing to a pure striker Chelsea possess, he looked worryingly off the pace when introduced here and his dallying cost the Blues two presentable chances to extend their lead, once even allowing Raya to come and pinch the ball off his toes to hand the Arsenal keeper a much-needed confidence boost.
It’s now seven points from the last nine available for Chelsea and that’s clearly Absolutely Fine – especially in light of what went before – but there does still seem to be a ceiling on what they can achieve with the tools Pochettino has at his disposal. And given the sums of money that have been spent on said tools, that ceiling really is far too low. They sit slap bang in mid-table and even after today’s two goals, of the nine teams above them only Manchester United have scored fewer. And three of those teams have a game in hand.
16) What we do know now, though, is a little bit more about Pochettino’s Chelsea than we did a few weeks ago. About how he intends to handle the frankly inexplicable weaknesses in a squad assembled at a cost unprecedented in this daft game of ours. While Fernandez and to a lesser extent Gallagher were at some fault for Arsenal’s first, he appears to have few concerns in that midfield now where that pair and Moises Caicedo form a formidable trio, while the defence looked absolutely rock solid right up until the moment it didn’t.
But while the underlying numbers (and not just the one that is “a billion actual pounds”) always suggested the Blues’ bad start was unlikely to continue, we don’t yet quite know how much to take from the recent recovery. All will be much clearer in another six weeks or so, after a really quite unnecessarily unpleasant run of consecutive league games against Tottenham, Manchester City, Newcastle, Brighton and Manchester United. If they’re further up the league after that than they are now, then maybe it really is all going to be okay for Poch and the gang.
