Arsenal frustrated by injuries and illness as league struggles continue away from London
Brighton & Hove Albion (0) 1 v Arsenal (1) 1
By Kaz Mochlinski at the Amex Community Stadium
Premier League
Matchweek 20
Talking Points
Some day soon Arsenal will once again get a victory away from London. However, that moment did not come at Brighton, extending to 133 days the Gunners’ run without winning a league game outside the capital.
Remarkably, Arsenal are still in second place in the Premier League despite not securing a single success in the competition when travelling from their home city since Saturday 24th August 2024 and a 0-2 result at Aston Villa.
Partly that is due to London having seven sides among the 20 in the Premier League, meaning that almost one-third of the opposition is local rather than out of town. Partially, it is also down to an idiosyncracy in the fixture list this season.
Arsenal have not had to leave London for a league match since Saturday 2nd November 2024, when they lost 1-0 at Newcastle United. A subsequent series of away days across the capital has followed.
It is just as well that the Gunners are good in London derbies, staying unbeaten in all five that they have played in a row on the road in the past eight weeks, taking their current sequence without defeat against city rivals to 11 league contests in total.
That has helped them substantially to sustain another attempt at a title challenge during a time when the Arsenal head coach Mikel Arteta has been struggling to get his preferred players out onto the pitch.
He has not been able to field his first-choice starting XI since the 1-1 draw at Chelsea two months ago. And that was only the third time at most he has managed it in all 29 games this season, after the visit to Villa Park and the home match with Brighton in August.
Even that assumes Arteta considers Gabriel Martinelli and Leandro Trossard to be essentially equal in status and entirely interchangeable on the left wing, switching between them depending on their form and the opposition being faced.
This time on the South Coast it was Trossard who started against his old club - ineffectively, to the delight of the Brighton fans who booed him throughout - while Martinelli came on as a substitute for the second half to make a landmark 200th appearance for Arsenal.
Trossard’s fellow former Albion player Ben White was one of four favourites of Arteta’s who were absent from the Gunners’ squad for the first Saturday of the New Year, including their other long-term injury victim, Bukayo Saka.
Jurriën Timber was suspended after receiving a yellow card in the away win against Brentford three days earlier, and Kai Havertz missed a second successive game with illness, which was also the cause for Martin Ødegaard only being fit enough to be named as a substitute.
It was the first time that Ødegaard was not in the starting line-up for a league match since his return from an ankle injury to lead the team at Chelsea. During this period Arsenal have now remained undefeated in 13 games in all competitions, winning nine.
The Norwegian has been involved in every one of these encounters, only once from the bench before Brighton, in the narrow League Cup quarter-final triumph over Crystal Palace last month.
Thrown on against Albion for the final 26 minutes, Ødegaard on this occasion could not conjure up a way to claim all three points, as Arsenal lost a lead for the first time since coming away from Stamford Bridge with the same score draw in mid-November.
Like the Gunners, Brighton had to change their captain, as Lewis Dunk was ruled out with a calf strain. Having endured a recent run of now eight winless matches, and recording their first-ever sequence of four consecutive draws in the Premier League, it seemed like a good time to play Albion.
Their loss of form has dropped the Sussex side from second in the table down to 10th place in just five weeks, with their young head coach Fabian Hürzeler still developing his tactical ideas and learning about the most suitable system for his much-altered squad.
Yet Brighton could well have snatched a comeback victory in the second half, as Arsenal’s exhaustion from 12 games in six weeks began to tell, along with the absence of half their first team.
Even then, it took an unequivocally bizarre penalty award for the Seagulls to equalise, when referee Anthony Taylor ruled that William Saliba’s head-to-head collision with João Pedro was a foul despite the Gunners’ defender first making contact with the ball.
Arteta was understandably unhappy afterwards, commenting: “I’ve never seen a decision like this in my career. I asked the boys if they have, and nobody has seen it before. When you look at the incident… João Pedro touching the ball and Saliba touching the ball, you can see contact there.”
The Arsenal boss was nevertheless full of praise for his depleted side, saying: “Especially with all the situations, injuries, illnesses, and players that we are missing, I think the team deserves a lot of credit.”
And Arteta added: “Obviously we wanted to win the game. This is a tough place to come and they are a very good side. We started well, scored a beautiful goal, and we were in control.
“In the second half we didn’t really grab the game or dominate enough to have certain moments and be more of a threat in their half. But defensively we did not concede much…
“When you are playing every three days or less than that, you cannot, with our amount of injuries and situations, maintain the level of performance and competitiveness. Today we lacked it in the second half.”
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