Arsenal 4-1 Leeds United: Shrugging - The Square Ball 3/4/23

AS PER

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

This game slipped away from Leeds United in a series of frustrated shrugs. Each goal against them was aggravating but felt inevitable, and how angry can you get with fate? The players just had to accept this. Arsenal? Better than them. Better than every other team in the Premier League, according to the table. This is not 1991, or 1999, and Leeds can not compete with Arsenal as equals. Even back then, Leeds did not often win against the Gunners.

This week’s trio of matches look like a test of United’s character, and this was probably the biggest to kick things off. Yes, a lot depends on how they ‘bounce back’ against Nottingham Forest on Tuesday night, and Crystal Palace on Sunday. But first that depended on how they got through ninety testing minutes at the Emirates. The results: the scoreline was heavy but not disastrous. The players did not lose their heads, there was no repeat of the red-cardarama of last season’s big teetering defeats to Arsenal and Chelsea. No new injuries to add to all the ones we’ve got so far. In fact, under the stern gaze of their new head coach, Leeds went through the last half hour like a necessary training drill, gaining ‘minutes’ for Rodrigo, Pat Bamford, Weston McKennie and Liam Cooper as they recover their fitness, gaining ‘experience’ for Georginio Rutter. From a fan’s point of view, watching this was agonising. But agony ended on the final whistle and then it was just what we’d expected at the start anyway.

Javi Gracia’s line-up was not what anyone expected, but gave Leeds enough foothold in the first half for them to regret the final score. Jackie Harrison, a winger, and Rasmus Kristensen, a full-back, played either side of Marc Roca in a midfield three, so they could drop in between Junior Firpo and Pascal Struijk, and Luke Ayling and Robin Koch, to play like two more centre-backs. Up front, Gracia chose Crysencio Summerville, Luis Sinisterra and Brenden Aaronson, because they’re the fastest runners and could break with the ball behind Arsenal’s back line when it was tempted into attacking. Them three also spent a lot of time at the back.

But they also got into Arsenal’s penalty area often enough in the first half an hour to have Aaron Ramsdale making saves and the fans of the Premier League leaders making spoilt, grumbling sounds. Kristensen started things with a shot in the first few seconds. Then Summerville ran clear and put Aaronson through, scampering into a crowd that blocked his shot. Summerville again, with the ball under control on the wing, played clever passes with Roca until he got a chance to shoot, forcing a save. I’ll say his name again, because Summerville passed into Harrison’s run behind him, but made the angle a bit too wide and the save on Harrison’s shot a touch too easy. Gracia could feel satisfied with this. Leeds weren’t letting Arsenal anywhere near Illan Meslier, and it wasn’t stopping them being a threat the other way.

What stopped Leeds was a brief foul by Ayling on Gabriel Jesus, who after being thoroughly blocked by Koch on one attack, focused smartly on beating Kristensen and Ayling on his next try, and took the opportunity to win a penalty once Ayling was on the floor. Ayling’s reaction, sitting on the ground with his head in his hands like a forward-roll gone wrong, was that of a player in the VAR era who knows there will be no getting away with this one. A group of Arsenal players went and guarded the penalty spot like the proper footballers do on the telly, and looked a bit daft when no Leeds players showed any interest in attacking the painted turf, like the proper footballers do on the telly.

Jesus scored the pen, and Leeds were reduced to tiptoeing between bouts of despair from there to the end of the game. Perhaps if they’d stuck to their nil-nil mentality, kept playing like they had in the first half an hour, they could yet have made that a success. But away from home, a goal down in a game with relegation implications, it was hard not to chase goals. This only gave Arsenal more chances before half-time, and fewer for Leeds. Gracia might have planned a second half reset but Benny White ruined whatever plans Leeds had within a minute, scoring from a cross to the back post. Harrison was the despairing player, knowing he should have tracked White’s run and stopped him. Worse, he knew he could have. He was doing it! He looked and he looked and always Benny was there. Then he didn’t look and it was a goal. That must hurt more, knowing you were doing the right thing even though you’re an attacker playing an unusual game of defending — and knowing you messed it up anyway. And knowing that, at 2-0, Arsenal would not be giving up their lead.

Their third was just skill, good players doing good passes, seeing clever runs, planning their moves and making them. Jesus finished from Leandro Trossard’s pass, and while Koch did some shouting about it, the game was all over, bar that. And bar a goal from Kristensen, after Harrison dribbled into a threatening area and put the ball across the edge of the penalty area, and the right-back in midfield hit a shot in off Zinchenko. Fine, but Arsenal just scored again anyway. There were six minutes left at that point. Ayling and Kristensen had a short debate about who should have stopped Granit Xhaka heading in a deep cross, but it was a fairly pointless discussion. If this tactical plan gets used again, it won’t be for a couple of weeks, until we play Liverpool, or maybe Manchester City in a month. No point worrying too much about this now.

Which is the sum of the game for Leeds, in the end. A performance and scoreline that can be shrugged off feels like a positive when the alternative was an existential crisis. At least Leeds avoided that. Other results meant they ended Saturday still outside the bottom three, which was better than the alternative. The game we thought they’d lose, they lost. The games we thought would matter more still matter as much as they did. A few hours of distraction for the fans, some exercise for the players, Saturday afternoon ended and Saturday evening began. That is, technically, why we all love league football.