Arsenal results suggest that Mikel Arteta has done a pretty good job of dealing with injuries and suspensions so far this season. Performances say something a bit different.
The big caveat here is that three of eight Premier League games have been played with at least half an hour spent down to 10 men. Analysing patterns and levels from these matches becomes effectively impossible or worthless from the moment the game state changes.
Unless Arsenal plan on doing this as regularly as they currently are, then it is hard to really know where this group are at and how things will move forward. Maybe the 2-0 win over Paris Saint-Germain is a good barometer, but then again, even the victory over Aston Villa away from home – a match played with Martin Odegaard – could easily have gone the other way.
There is simply a lot of noise from the opening two months of the season. Red cards, injuries, a tough fixture list, and yet they remain in the mix. To what extent Arsenal are as inevitable or impressive as the past two seasons is very much still in the air, though.
Arteta is not seeing his side blow teams away and they have been more reliant on magic from David Raya than they would like. The foundation of an elite team is the defence, but this has been something else entirely.
The games against Southampton and Leicester City raised some serious worries, for example. Is that the real Arsenal? Or is it the one from the first fortnight before Declan Rice’s dismissal against Brighton? In some ways, they haven’t been the same since.
