How Arsenal Came Out on Top in the North London Derby

In an intriguing North London Derby, Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal got the better of Ange Postecoglou’s Tottenham Hotspur despite surrendering possession for most of the game as well as territory. Arsenal spent most of the game in front of their own box, but never really looked uncomfortable, thwarting Tottenham’s attacks by design centrally.

If you’re as good as set-pieces as Arsenal are, it is no longer a sequence where you hope you will score it becomes a potent weapon where you can hurt teams. Add in the fact that Guglielmo Vicario struggles with corners and it’s a real headache for Tottenham.

Arsenal’s tactic of having five tall players making runs from outside the six yard area to inside whenever the corner was taken caused immense problems for Vicario. It also created a problem for the players marking the front post as they’re having to track runners from afar.

Players that enter the box aren’t initially marked, they’re only picked up spontaneously once they make a run inside the six-yard area.

There’s three Tottenham players at the front post all looking over to the Arsenal players already marked here (notice the mismatch of Brennan Johnson vs. Kai Havertz) in a split second look at the melee in the box and the amount of players making movements in the six yard box as Vicario flaps it. It was a warning shot to Tottenham.

Much of the game looked like the images below, with Spurs building up with Cristian Romero – Mickey van den Ven and James Maddison – Rodrigo Bentancur as the closest midfielders to defence, the central passing lanes were completely crowded out from Arsenal by even squeezing the strikers in front of Spurs’s midfielders.

If you can block off the centre with every man back and the opposition’s central players are not providing much width nor are they looking to overload wide areas by joining the wingers (Heung-min Son and Johnson) you’ll find that it is quite simple to quell an opponent’s attacks, which is exactly why Arsenal were comfortable throughout.

Another example of what Spurs really should’ve done more of was when Dejan Kulusevski finally dragged Jorginho around and crucially Pedro Porro dropped deeper to create a 3 in build-up. When this happened Gabriel Martinelli pressed and Kulusevski found space in between Jurrien Timber and Gabriel Magalhaes.

With Porro a little deeper Martinelli is again pulled towards him as Kulusevski moves Jorginho inward then out with his run so Bentancur can now receive turn and play him in, as opposed to receiving then going backwards to Romero again. When Tottenham got into these wide areas though the cross was bad.

Spurs really didn’t do this enough however and mainly resorted to poor crosses into the box or a lot of the game was Maddison and Bentancur receiving it but then an Arsenal player would quickly press them giving them no option but to go back to Romero or Van den Ven.

Overall Arsenal were well setup without the ball, happy to threaten on the counter and manage the wide options, with Spurs not utilising wide areas enough and spending most of the game in front of Arsenal’s box pointlessly with solutions they could’ve used right in front of them.

By: Dharnish Iqbal / @dharnishiqbal

Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Sebastian Frej / MB Media / Getty Images