Perhaps in years to come those who were present at the Etihad Stadium for this extended headlock, football reimagined as a complex and lingering Sunday hangover, will say I was there when Manchester City failed to score in a home game for the first time in 58 matches.
What to say about a game that wasn’t really a game, a decider that decided very little, beyond keeping the Premier League title race still tantalisingly open? What happened here anyway?
The first half of this 0-0 draw was like watching someone sit a high‑level engineering exam. Intricate, unknowable things seemed to be happening. No doubt there is deep-data analysis to be made of those 45 minutes of feint and counter-feint, the ghost‑pressing of Bernardo Silva, the almost total lack of involvement of Erling Haaland, who skulked at the edges of the afternoon like a nephew forced to walk around an art gallery.
A few things did happen. Perhaps the most notable was the recurrent spectacle of Nicolas Jover, Arsenal’s set-piece coach, leaping up every time his team won or conceded a corner, striding out to replace Mikel Arteta in the managerial crow’s nest, pointing and whistling, frowning sagely as another deep delivery was punted into the arms of Stefan Ortega. This kind of makes sense, logically. But it really has to stop.
There were brief flickers of freedom. With 76 minutes gone Kevin De Bruyne went barrelling down the left wing, bouncing Thomas Partey away, trying to make football happen. His cross found Jérémy Doku, who stopped, jinked, then walloped the ball weirdly high and wide, like a man punting an empty tin can with a square‑toed boot.
In between it was novel and even quite comforting to see a football match so devoid of content. City had 75% possession in the first half, total territorial dominance, but only one shot on target. Some 56 tackles were attempted in this game. There were 28 clearances.
At the end of which Arsenal will probably be happiest of the two teams, if not as happy as Liverpool, who won earlier in the day. Arsenal wanted a 0-0 at the very least. And they got one, a gruelling, draining 0-0 that felt all the same like a slight missed opportunity. Did Arsenal miss a trick here?
Arteta insisted afterwards that this was “an exciting game, and a good result”. Really? The first of these may be true in some tactical hyper-purist sense. The second is arguable. The ultimate verdict on a cagey, no-frills, low block point at the Etihad Stadium will as ever be outcome-based, decided by what happens elsewhere, on other afternoons.
But Arsenal also probably won’t have many better chances to actually win at City’s home. And here they played a different kind of game to the one that brought all those victories since the winter sun break. Arsenal’s big thing is intensity, what L’Équipe has called “controlled euphoria”. This has involved starting quickly, hitting their opponents with that straight up red blitz, the press led with a kind of mania by Martin Ødegaard. Would they have the nerve to do it here?
That would be a no. City lined up with a muscular blue wall of six primarily defensive players. From the early moments they pinned Arsenal in, killed the centre of the pitch, taking all the air out of that spaces. There were collisions and stretched sinews, ruminative 27-pass moves. It was a total suffocation, pillow over the face football. City had control, but not a great deal more. This wasn’t end‑to‑end stuff. It was end stuff.
With an hour gone Pep Guardiola did at least try to alter that pattern, sending on Doku and Jack Grealish. There was some crazy whirring‑legs stuff from Doku. De Bruyne charged a little harder.
In the middle of this Haaland didn’t so much have a terrible game as a pointless one, as he has a few times against better teams. Very early on he came deeper, into those gallop spaces where he is frankly irresistible once the ball is sucked in.
Then he stopped doing that, as his afternoon became one of those games where, rather than, say, the best footballer in the world, he barely looks like a footballer at all. It was said of Cristiano Ronaldo at Juventus that he solved the problems he created. Haaland didn’t do that here. On days like these it is a little like playing with a self-imposed handicap.
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For Arsenal Declan Rice had a solid game. Ødegaard was probably the star turn. He is a strange player, a mixture of fierce and relentless pressing and beautifully refined skill in possession, like a hyper-technical James Milner. He tackled and pressed and fouled a lot, producing a performance to order.
City had control but not the incision to make it count. Arsenal killed the game just enough to leave a chance of winning it. Will they regret not going full Arsenal here, not committing more to attack, not showing their recent fire? Arteta will hope not, will spin this as another hurdle vaulted. One thing does seem certain. This one will now run to the end.
