I watched a few bits of the Leeds vs Everton game last night, mainly because we have Leeds at the weekend and aside from the dodgy penalty given, I have to say Leeds’ desire to be quite free-flowing and forward-looking was quite refreshing. Obviously as an Arsenal fan you hope they bring that to the Emirates on Saturday, because it would mean plenty of space for us to operate in, but I suspect the Leeds I saw last night will be very different to the one that rocked up on their own patch and played a pretty poor-looking Everton off the park.

There’s still a solid five days before that game and given it’s only Tuesday, I haven’t quite caught up on all of my Arsenal #content yet, so my mind is still on that Old Trafford victory. With the benefit of a little bit of distance between the game and now, I’m feeling much more bullish with every passing day, but I am also guilty of looking even beyond this weekend’s game and the match against Liverpool the week after, super-imposing that performance on Sunday to that trip to Anfield. Obviously football doesn’t work like that. Liverpool won’t play like Man United and I’d be surprised if we play like we did. Game state is everything and our early goal set us in a pattern of play for the game, as it did with United and the onus on them to try to rescue something from their first home game of the season, but the transitional nature of the game on Sunday has had me thinking a bit:

What if our new direct approach turns the game at Anfield in to a transitional basketball match?

We had it on Sunday in that first half for sure. Our decision making and some of the final third passing wasn’t there and that stopped us from putting the game to bed. But against Liverpool we would come up against an elite transition unit that want to engage in a basketball game. If you’re Liverpool, you want it going end-to-end; they know they almost certainly have the best attacking force in the league and when the games are stretched and there’s space to run in to, that’s where the likes of Salah, Ekitike, Gakpo and Wirtz would be able to flourish. We, however, are built on a solid defensive foundations that prefers control. Arteta was to control the tempo of games, the possession, the stretch of the pitch. He doesn’t want to see games backwards and forwards and if we have a situation like we saw at times in that first half at Old Trafford, happen at Anfield, then I think we’re going to see our winless streak up there extended even further than it already is.

This weekend we hope for an open and transitional game, but we aren’t going to get one, which makes me wonder if weirdly that might be good for us. Providing we get the goals required to win the game, perhaps the tough start to this season needs to be in the mould of the Arsenal we’ve come to know under Arteta, i.e. controlled, defensively sound, trying to close spaces and make the pitch smaller. It feels to me like the first six or seven games this season – right up until we play Man City at home – needs to be one in which we have a lot more control and less of the chaos of basketball-style transitional games.

Whether or not Arsenal and Arteta can do that remains to be seen. As already mentioned, so much of football is dependent on the game state. If Arsenal are going to be able to get early goals in all of these upcoming matches, then you can set yourself in your shape, be compact at the back and pick off teams in transition yourself, without having to have it turn into a ‘you run, we run’ kind of game. But if they go behind, it’s a different story. We will, I suspect, have to deal with both scenarios in these next five or six matches and so I’m interested to see how we react to each game state and how much has changed. Going behind last season was a real ballache; teams knew that they could tuck in, low block, let us play the horseshoe of death football with them camped in their own box. It’s why we picked up so many draws. What we need to see – but we haven’t yet – is how different this Arsenal team is to reacting to adversity. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see it this weekend or anything like that, but it does kind of feel like there is a test awaiting this Arsenal team to prove they can turn those draws into wins this season. That’s the missing piece of the puzzle and it will most likely come in a game where we have opponents who score against the run of play like we did to United.

When we can see that this team can do that – turn those draws into wins against low block teams – then I think a lot of us will start to feel like this could be an exciting year. But until then, the questions about the team will remain, unfortunately.

I’m going to leave it there for today I think. Off into the Big Smoke for a day in the office. Catch you all tomorrow.