Soccer News Soccer Match Reports, Football News
Match report – Player ratings – Arteta reaction
After the game yesterday, I was in the kitchen, preparing some food for later on.
‘What’s wrong?’, I thought to myself. There was an unease about me.
‘I know what it is’, the other part of my brain thought back. ‘It’s that feeling you get when Arsenal lose an important football match.’
‘So it is’, I replied to myself in my own head. ‘And I do not care for it one bit.’
Yesterday was, in simple terms, a bad day at the office. I mentioned in the preview that the ingredients were there for a shock result. New manager bounce + early kick-off + our record at Goodison Park + the fact that Everton hadn’t won a game in ages meaning the law of averages was on their side too. But we’ve been so good this season I was confident we could overcome that.
The team was pretty much as expected, and Everton were exactly as I expected. Well up for it, properly organised because whatever you might say about Sean Dyche he’s no Frank Lampard, and they made life difficult for us. They’re not the first team to do that though, and most of the time we’ve been able to cope. We made life difficult for ourselves too.
The pace and precision of our passing was not there. By the time we got the ball to our wide players, Everton doubled up on them in a flash, and that seemed to be the pattern. We’d try it, it didn’t work, we’d try it again and so on, hoping for a spark of inspiration from Saka or Martinelli who were well marshaled by Everton’s defenders.
We had a couple of first half chances. Eddie Nketiah did well to make space for a shot but the attempt on goal itself was really poor, blasting high and wide at the near post rather than going across the keeper. Saka had a really well controlled volley cleared off the line, but by then we were a bit fortunate it was still 0-0. Amadou Onana’s brilliant burst down their left saw him deliver a really dangerous low cross that Dominic Calvert-Lewin was…
Source link : https://arseblog.com/2023/02/everton-1-0-arsenal-gunners-stumble-at-goodison-again/
Author : arseblog
Publish date : 2023-02-05 09:17:13
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
