The focus will be on the sense of injustice swamping Arsenal fans with the sending off of Gabriel and later on Santi Cazorla. Mike Dean is the culprit in essentially a distraction. For Arsenal, the focus really should be on how they were playing before being reduced to nine men.
Lets face it. The Gunners weren’t exactly rocking the boat before Gabriel self immolated after getting suckered in by Diego Costa in an all too familiar pattern of goading and taunting. The Chelsea forward should’ve been thrown out on his ear but there is no escaping the Brazilian should have known better. However here it is as I saw it:
Alexis Sanchez vs Branislav Ivanovic mismatch never happened:
Before the match, the conventional wisdom was the Serbian full back would be literally begging for mercy after being taken apart by the fleet footed Alexis Sanchez. After all the evidence before this match pointed to a complete decline. It never happened. Sanchez is a pale shadow of the player lighting up the league in his first season. The Chilean’s penchant cutting in from the left to the centre turned into a liability allowing the heart of defence to collapse on him without exploiting the mismatch. He ended up losing the ball, got blocked, or was wildly off target with his shooting. The scenario of Sanchez dragging players out never played out as he turned in to disadvantageous positions even before pressurizing Ivanovic. Arsenal through inertia and narrow bandwidth became predictably stagnant. Rewind to the Crystal Palace match last weekend, Ivanovic regularly tormented by Bakary Sako hugging the sidelines using his speed to stretch space and finding players.
Theo Walcott vs Chelsea heart of defence was abandoned:
There were glimpses of potential damage in the early going as Theo Walcott came inches beating the offside trap as Mesut Oezil and Santi Cazorla fed him some clearing passes. A promising route which should have been persisted with but was inexplicably abandoned as Arsenal turned to strong arming through the middle. This despite the fact Chelsea were actually playing a fairly high line. Walcott before the Gabriel sending off was neutralized to one shot on goal. The converted winger is not a strong one on one player- he requires service to catch out defenders and pace to get the better of them. From thereon, he was peripheral to the game despite those promising opening minutes.
Arsenal were losing the possession game through cheap giveaways and poor clearances:
Statistics are your best friend in this case. Chelsea after weathering the first opening minutes were dominating possession quite nicely, stroking the ball with ease. Arsenal in another destructive pattern were gifting the ball to Chelsea, dispossessed 7 times before the sending off which supposedly “turned the game” around. More to the point was the pattern of dispossession and turnovers were overwhelmingly in the final third with Arsenal’s attack petering out and allowing Chelsea to recycle the ball keeping pressure on the Arsenal defence. One of these turnovers begat the Diego Costa conflagration which saw Koscielny being manhandled and Gabriel baited into the red. The culprits were Sanchez, Oezil, and Aaron Ramsey, in effect the entirety of the Arsenal midfield.
Francis Coquelin’s halftime withdrawal was detrimental:
This will be buried in the lede of Mike Dean is a Chelsea and Mourinho cock gobbler. Which is probably all true but the fact is Arsenal came under tremendous pressure with Coquelin’s withdrawal at half time after suffering a knee hyperextension injury. Calum Chambers was drafted in an emergency and he did the best he could. The ticket to trying to salvage the game was to have Coquelin affording protection and through a giveaway forcing a counter. Cazorla might think he was hard done by the send off but if Coquelin has been on the field, the Spaniard would not have been forced into the position of having to make an ill advised and desperate lunge. This was pretty much the end of the road for an Arsenal comeback and it was all over with Eden Hazard’s stoppage time goal, his first in the league this season.
Arsene Wenger is now a psychological barrier to winning against big sides:
The Arsenal manager’s body language is terrible. He is a face carved into fissures through persistent misery and tension. Part of the problem is that Wenger simply does not know how to win such matches. This was one of Wenger’s best chances to put a small dent in the overwhelming league record stacked against him. A side muddling its way through showing signs of age, fatigue, rust, and unresponsive to the manager ripe for the picking. 12 goals shipped against the lesser lights of the league. Another loss and “a specialist in failure” would be a joke turned on its head with Mourinho groping his way out of Stamford Bridge. But Wenger is a manager seemingly unable to exploit these weaknesses. Not ruthless enough. Not tactical enough. Not composed enough. No wins in 13 league encounters. No goals in five successive matches against Chelsea. This not an outlier, this is a full on rejection of the null hypothesis. Strangely, when it comes to exploitation: The actual tragedy of these sendings off will be Wenger handing himself a getting out of jail free card.
For those who tuned off through a sickening sense of deja vu or could not watch because of the early start time: The first half and the second.