For Arsenal this season could only have started better if Manchester City, who look like being one of their two most serious challengers, had dropped points. But it’s not just about results: Arsenal have been comfortably the better side in each of those three games, approaching each of them in very different ways. After the controlled victory over Coventry City and the tight game against Aston Villa that was won thanks to ratcheting up the pressure in the 15 minutes after half-time, came success in a far more open game in which they conceded for the first time this season.
Chelsea tested Arsenal on Sunday, went ahead, and yet Mikel Arteta’s side still always looked like they would win – even if it did take a superb late save from David Raya to keep out an Estevão shot. But the goalkeeper too is part of their strength; even if an opposing team can work a shooting opportunity, Raya has the capacity for spectacular saves that can dispirit opponents. Arsenal threatened from set-pieces but also from open play; they can beat opponents in multiple different ways, even when Declan Rice, probably their player of the season last year, has an off day (his unpunished late trip on Morgan Rogers was cynical and nasty, one of those deliberate offences miles from the ball that the game would benefit from treating as a red card offence).
The uplift may simply be confidence, the pressure of not having won the title, of those three successive second-place finishes, now lifted. But there are also individuals who look sharper, livelier, fresher than they did at any point last season. Martin Ødegaard is perhaps the most obvious.
He struggled with injuries last season and scored only one goal; already this season he has two in the league and one in the Community Shield. Some players return from the World Cup and look exhausted or find the readaptation to the grind of the domestic game difficult; Ødegaard seems reinvigorated. There is an imagination to his play, a lightness, and he took his goal against Chelsea superbly.
His link-ups with Kai Havertz, another at times mercurial presence, were often delightful, conjuring space and angles where none seemed to exist and bringing the winner. In a team that last season developed a reputation for uncompromising physicality, there is something almost otherworldly about seeing two such ephemeral talents combining, sprites glimmering on a castle wall. But it’s not just Ødegaard.
For Bukayo Saka, last season felt like chickens coming home to roost. He is only 25 but Sunday brought what was already his 205th league start, while playing regularly for England as well. Fatigue had been stored up, which is always a worry for players who emerge as early as he did.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
