Arsenal’s faint and fading hopes of title finally extinguished at Forest
Nottingham Forest 0 v Arsenal 0
By Kaz Mochlinski at the City Ground
Premier League
Matchweek 27
Arsenal’s already faint and fading hopes of winning the Premier League title this season were finally all but extinguished by a goalless draw with Nottingham Forest on a frustrating night beside the River Trent.
Riccardo Calafiori hit the post midway through the first half, but otherwise Arsenal managed to produce only one attempt on target against a very determined, hard-working and well-organised Forest team.
The stalemate left the London side still in second place in the table but now 13 points behind Liverpool with just 11 matches remaining. Even if Arsenal were to win their game in hand they would trail by a double-figure number.
Mikel Arteta chose to continue with his insistence that the title race was not yet over, but the Gunners head coach looked and sounded like a beaten and almost broken man after the final whistle at Forest.
“It’s about winning now. It’s about our games. That’s the only thing we can control” Arteta emphasised. “It was the same a week ago, 10 days ago, two months ago. That’s the only thing we can do.”
However, the chances of any Arsenal victories will not be high if they repeat the performance produced at the City Ground, as their lack of a striker and the run of recent injuries left them desperately blunt in attack.
With Arsenal dominating possession, their clever and creative captain, Martin Ødegaard, saw plenty of the ball, but the options available to him rarely promised to unlock Forest’s low block and two rows of four defenders.
Mikel Merino was a surprising scoring success as a substitute against Leicester City on the Gunners’ last visit to the East Midlands a week and a half ago. He floundered this time played out of position as a “false number nine”.
In both Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli’s absence, Leandro Trossard has been largely lacklustre lately, while Ethan Nwaneri struggled from relatively early on at the City Ground with muscle fatigue and cramps.
And whoever was responsible for bringing in Raheem Sterling last summer on loan from Chelsea must be regretting the move. The winger’s replacement of Nwaneri was a cue for visiting supporters to start leaving the Bridgford Stand.
Arsenal’s most effective attacker in the first half was Calafiori getting forward from left-back. A cut inside onto his right foot made an opening for a shot curled round the goalkeeper, only for it to rebound off the post.
The Italian defender was surprisingly substituted at half-time, with Arteta explaining that it was because of the yellow card shown in the opening minutes as Callum Hudson-Odoi ran at him with pace and threat.
Subsequently, Calafiori was again caught out by a break on the right wing from Hudson-Odoi, with whom he seemed to make contact and bring down while chasing behind him into the penalty box.
The referee, Andy Madley, did not deem the coming-together sufficient to give a foul, a decision quickly confirmed by VAR, but it was clearly enough for Arteta to reconsider his team’s balance between attack and defence.
Yet the Forest centre-back Nikola Milenković was similarly cautioned right at the outset, and he stayed on to turn in a man-of-the-match performance, particularly in repelling Arsenal’s ever-dangerous set-pieces.
Despite there being very few scoring opportunities for either side, the game was still an absorbingly fascinating and tense tactical battle, not least as Forest’s fine defence sought to stop the Gunners at the 11 corners they forced.
It was from a Declan Rice corner at the start of the second half that Matz Sels had to make his solitary save of the match, moving adeptly across his six-yard box to get in the way of Merino’s goal-bound far-post header.
Kieran Tierney took over from Calafiori and came almost equally close to scoring, with a near-post header going narrowly wide from an excellent inswinging corner sent in by Ødegaard shortly after Merino’s effort.
Ødegaard himself was prevented from making the breakthrough towards the end by brilliant blocks from Murillo and then by Sels, although his double attempt would not have counted anyway because of a delayed offside being belatedly given.
Instead, Forest almost stole all three points with two late chances carved out by the quick-thinking and skillful touch of Morgan Gibbs-White, but Arsenal were reprieved by Chris Wood having a very rare off-day.
In his best season ever, Wood did not add to his 18 goals so far, as he was unable to sort out his feet fast enough to first shoot past David Raya and then not long later get a strike away before William Saliba slid in with a recovery tackle.
The result was Forest’s first scoreless draw of this campaign - and the first 0-0 game in the Premier League seen at the City Ground since 1998, so all of 27 years ago and back in the last century.
Arsenal will be much more concerned about not scoring in consecutive league matches for the first time in 21 months, following on from the disappointing home defeat by West Ham United at the weekend.
The Gunners have now failed to score in nine games this season, plus on several other occasions they have relied on set-piece routines, especially corners, even when Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus were playing prior to their injuries.
It will provide no consolation that they prevented Forest from getting a goal in either of their two encounters, keeping a clean sheet again as in the 3-0 success in November - and for the 16th time in total in all competitions in 2024-25.
That is not a trivial achievement against opponents who won their previous home match 7-0 when ripping apart Brighton & Hove Albion earlier in the month. But the recriminations at the end were not edifying, with Rice and Gabriel Magalhães arguing on the pitch.
“It’s about what we can do, and it was like this a week ago, two weeks before, three months ago” underlined Arteta. “That’s the only thing that we can control if we want to have a real chance to do anything.
“Today we dropped two points, which is very painful again, and we have to step up - we have the Champions League, we have a beautiful competition in front of us, and we have to be ready.”
The Forest fans have their doubts about that, celebrating their own dual European Cup triumphs of 1979 and 1980 while taunting Arsenal by repeatedly chanting “Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that!”
Even more painful might have been hearing “Second again, olé, olé!” and “Mikel Arteta, it’s happened again!” - as well as “Mikel Arteta, it must be the ball!” due to his past comments on the balls used in the League Cup.
No goals and one point apiece, but there was something to delight in for the Forest crowd. The strangest contest between the third and second teams in the Premier League at least took the home side a step closer to qualifying for European football once more.
Nottingham Forest: (4-2-3-1) Sels - Aina, Milenković, Murillo, Williams - Domínguez (Danilo 62), Anderson - Hudson-Odoi, Gibbs-White, Elanga (Yates 62) - Wood (Awoniyi 85)
Arsenal: (4-2-3-1) Raya - Timber (White 85), Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori (Tierney 46) - Jorginho (Zinchenko 70), Rice - Nwaneri (Sterling 77), Ødegaard (Partey 85), Trossard - Merino
Attendance: 30,200
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