How Mikel Arteta Just Broke Man City's System

All right, so I'm going to try and make this sound as exciting as possible. This was the Arsenal 11 as they theoretically lined up at the start and the story of the game is move, counter move. Man City are doing something. Arsenal come up with a clever way to nullify it. Then Man City try and do something else and Arsenal come up with another clever way to nullify that. And so on and so forth for 90 minutes. And job one was in the way that Arsenal set up and I think Artella got this absolutely bang on. So in possession, yes Arsenal with this 433 shape but out of possession they play with A442 and it varies depending on the personnel but usually Martin Erdogard will go and join Kai Havit upfront in a 2. Rice and Georginio sit as a double pivot and the two wide attack is they are a little bit more conservative. They try and block off the channels. Now Arsenal were always going to set up this way against Man City. There's nothing special about this, but what they changed was how aggressive they are with it. Now You may Arsenal fans remember last season where you were really aggressive in the press at the Etihad and City pulls left. They pulled your right and then they pulled your pants down. But their approach today was far more effective because instead of having an ode God pressing the two centre backs here, instead they just went and sat on the two pivots. Now this presented quite the head scratcher to Manchester City because normally with either a centre back stepping forward or one of the fullbacks coming across, they would attempt to outnumber teams 4 versus 3 in this middle area. But they're already starting at a disadvantage. Arsenal effectively had a box to stop their box. What it meant was, even if they did end up doing that, let's say coverage pushed a little bit forward and a kanji came into one of the pivots, they've not created any advantage at all there. It's still just 4V4 and now they've left one of Arsenal attackers totally free. But move counter, move. Pep then said basically. All right, OK, let's forget the box, let's not try and get anybody too far at position and instead had his two wide players say hello to Phil Foden and Bernardo Silva come incredibly, incredibly narrow. And we can see this very neatly represented in City's average positions in this because it's normally the job of the two wide players you know this to stay as wide as possible, to stretch the opposition defense across the line and leave these little gaps in the half space for the more creative players. But didn't do that. They came inside, made a 5 versus 4, but Arsenal, whether they predicted this happening or were just very good at dealing with it on the fly, were absolutely fine with it and went incredibly narrow. Themselves just congest the entire center of the pitch. The defense massively compacted, which just completely locked down Erling Holland and ensured that if City did get the overload here with one of these extra players, there was always somebody who could aggressively jump out of that back line and even things up. And by and large for that first half this worked really well for Arsenal. Like Nathan Ake should probably score from that corner. I think it is, but they don't create anything really an open play. Erling Holland has all touches of the ball in the entire opening 45. And I mean obviously the payoff to this is that they can't get anything going the other way. They don't really make any chances of their own, but they are playing City at the edge yard and restricting them that much is a huge tactical win. But of course, move counter, move. Towards the end of the first half, Nathan Ake picks up an injury and is replaced by Rico Lewis. Now you would assume, given that everyone else in the back line is a central defender, you just stick one of them in the middle, then Lewis out fullback positions and then if you want to invert them, you can. But Pep does not do that. Instead he sticks Rico Lewis straight into the midfield with Kovacic and Rodri. Now you might think, oh, that's quite clever, isn't it? Because because Arsenal aren't pressing the center back, you might as well have another and there, so you don't need both of these players to come off the wing. So now one of them can potentially get into the space that Arsenal leaving by being quite narrow. But that's not what they were trying to do. What Kovacic did was effectively a reverse John Stones rather than moving into the midfield from the defence, he started to move into the defence from the midfield. And what on earth, Why would you do that? Well, Arsenal now have two conflicting instructions, don't they? Because instruction #1 is don't press the center backs. But instruction #2 is sit on Kovacic and you can't do both. And it was actually right here where Guardiola very briefly did start to win that tactical battle because Arsenal could not allow Kovacic to have that much time on the ball. He was so much better with it than the other center backs would have been, so they did occasionally get drawn out of their shape to press him and denying that time. And then all of a sudden that meant that he could just knock the ball into sort of these wider areas where they had an overload. And it was this breaking of the shape here combined with the narrowness that Arsenal had at the back that led to Man City best opportunities for most of the game. And they usually involved vardiol, or was occasionally kanji on the other side, but it was usually vardiol getting all the way down the left hand side unchallenged. And you could just like see how all these little problems are leading to that happening. Like either Kovacic is getting the sort of time on the ball required to find him, or they are pressing up onto him because they can't have that time and someone in the middle of the pitch is having the time to then find him but to move and counter move. And this might be the best one of the entire game, because Artella could see that Vardiol was getting down the left hand side. He could see all the time and all the space he had and his ability to float the ball into the box. And he said so in what Vardiol is not some great crosser of the ball. Silver and Foden who could be arriving into the box are not massive aerial threats and they always had early Harland 2 on one so Arteta was quite happy. Bavardi altar just swing that ball in unmarked from the left hand side and you can see here he had six goes in it. He missed with five of them and the one that did find Erling Harlan's heads he was double marked and it was no threat whatsoever. Like that's that's a very brave system to employ just let them have it but it worked but and I'm getting so sick of saying this move and counter move arsenal are really narrow. City's only source of joy is down both the flanks, so Pep goes full chaos mode and bring on both greenish and docu at the same time. It kind of goes to this like 3331. I think. Like it was quite hard to work out where Bernardo Silva was supposed to be in all of this, but it kind of they did just have three players here and there were three were receiving the ball and obviously they were there and I think this is what they were doing. It was something like this. So now, when the ball did find either of these players, let's take Ben White for example. He had to go out and stop greenish having the time and space because he really could do something with it. And that by extension allowed Kevin Debruyne to get into the half spaces the first time they'd open up, which would Force One of the Arsenal center backs to cover across, leaving Holland for the first time in the game. Finally one-on-one with a defender. But come on now, everybody say it with me. Move, counter, move. Jack Grealish. Obviously fantastic on the ball, but Ben White had a pretty good hand. A lot of he didn't look like he was going to fly past him at any point. The really exciting bit was Doku versus Kirio like in regards of creating space on a football pitch. A flying winger versus a centre back in a wide area is like Curry to a piss head. Hence why it lasted exactly 4 minutes, more or less. The second Jeremy Doku got on that football pitch, Arteta immediately had Tommy as you warm up, got him straight on the pitch, put him out on that side and shut down Doku in any real serious way. And I actually don't think anything typifies precisely why Arsenal were able to get a point in this match quite like that, because this is all tinkering and chess and nerd stuff on the actual pitch. It comes down to individual battles, like OK, you're going to double up on Erling Holland, but if he just does really well and beats those two defenders he might still score. And over there that's a great idea, get a proper fall back on to stop the proper winger. But it only works if he does his job and Tommy ASU absolutely did that job brilliantly, just like every other player in this Arsenal side. That's my dear friends. I must now enter into the second part of this video because I have seen people slating Arsenal for this sort of negative anti football approach and that they definitely just turned up to try and get a nil. Nil right. Well, no, they they definitely turned up to try and win this game. They had a plan to score the goal that would do that and it very, very nearly worked. Now Arsenal only had something like 27% possession in this game, which is a season low by some distance for them. And that's because their main priority every time they had the ball was just don't give it away somewhere stupid. And the best illustration of this by a mile is in David Ryers distribution that the guy plays short, he gets involved with the defense, he sometimes even works as a third center back. But here today he was going long pretty much every single time. And that's because for large part of this game Arsenal didn't really want the ball. They didn't want to try and play through Man City. They wanted City to try and play through them, so they might take it off them. But their plan pretty clearly I think was to do this for long enough in the game that you effectively like open up the areas required to then go and steal it. Everything about the way Arsenal set up in this game, from how they're back forward, structured to how they were pressing, encouraged Narrowness, right? It was funneling everything into the center of the pitch. While it was making them really hard to play through. It was also inviting Man City with the temptation to commit players out wide. Because that's where the space was, and if you're going to hurt them, you need to use the space. And then in the 85th minute, you very nearly saw precisely why they were doing this. They finally find Mark Nerdegaard in between the lines in a central space, able to play the ball forward and both of the correct runs from the substitutes. Bear in mind the fresh players they brought on Trossard and Martinelli are perfectly timed into the space that City have left in the wide areas. The ball from Erdogard is perfect and I think genuinely Leandro Trossard could and should knock this first time into the path of Martinelli. And all of a sudden Arsenal have created the best chance in the entire game and something they probably should win it from. But instead his touch just isn't quite perfect and he allows the defender to cover over him. By the time he does get it under control, City have got players back. But I just I just saw in this moment this entire plan, the structure, the discipline, the changes, everything, almost coming together perfectly. But it didn't. But do you want to know what the ultimate bit of stylistic adaptation was on ARSENALS behalf here you do good, right? I'll tell you, normally Arsenal concede around 9 fouls per game in the Premier League, actually puts them second lowest in the division for that particular stack. But today? In this game they conceded 20 fouls and that is because you can do all the nerd stuff in the world. You can pour over all the geeky data. You can have such ingrained footballing philosophy. Sometimes nothing just beats the approach of just kick them lads if you're not sure what to do, Just can kick them. Do you know what? Fair play. And that was that, wasn't it? I do think A point for Arsenal away at the Etihad taking four points from City when they gave them six last season is absolutely enormous and could probably be the thing that does ultimately win the title. But it's in Liverpool's hands now, isn't it? And none of them play each other again. So this is going to be fun anyway though, if you're sitting there at home wondering how on earth I pulled that much content out of such a dull game, then I don't know either to be completely honest. But why not subscribe to the channel so you can see what I can do when there's goals? You get me across all the social media at Adam Cleary, CLERY, Twitter, slash X and Insta. And I'm on Tiktok now for some reason. Don't know why. So go and follow me there the last few days to grab a copy of the Trent Alexander Arnold issue of 442. The new one drops this week. I'm quite excited about reading that, honestly I am, even though I work here. But until next time, that was it, I think. Check out the newsletter for 442. We do this really cool thing and this stuff in it that's also cool. The description is down below and I think that's everything I have to tell you about before I go. Yeah, happy. Hope you're having a nice bank holiday. I'm not. Bye.