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Half-time entertainment/refreshment. The best sort.
HALF TIME: Arsenal 1-1 Chelsea
Arsenal were the better team for the majority of the half … but Chelsea bookended it well, starting impressively and finishing it strongly. This game’s poised deliciously now. A big half of football coming up for both teams! Should be fun.
45 min +3: Arsenal fans will demur, but Chelsea kind of deserved that after the Rice elbow that immediately preceded the goal. Arsenal try to respond immediately, Rice flinging a long throw in from the right, but Fernandez clears. On the touchline, Mikel Arteta looks extremely unimpressed.
GOAL! Arsenal 1-1 Chelsea (Hincapie og 45+2)
James whips viciously to the near post. Hincapie rises highest, but only manages to eyebrow the ball across Raya and into his own net! Arsenal have been hoist by their own petard!
45 min: A Chelsea corner down the left. It’s sent to the near post, where it flicks off Rice’s elbow and towards the top left of his own goal. Raya does well to claw the ball away for another corner. Rice had his arms around Hato’s neck at the time, so his arms weren’t exactly in a natural position. You’ve seen penalties given for less, but neither referee nor VAR punish him. But it doesn’t matter, because from the next corner …
44 min: Saka launches long down the left for Gyokeres, who tries to dance his way past Chalobah but fails. As Chelsea clear, he dives near the prone Chalobah. He wants a penalty, but should get a yellow card. He gets neither. Chalobah gets up and gives him the what-for.
42 min: Arsenal launch a four-on-three counter. Trossard plays the ball straight to Caicedo, when it was surely easier to hoick it towards Rice, in about half-a-pitch’s worth of space on the left. Much groaning. Those Afternoon Pints wearing off. But it’s OK. Half-time soon!
40 min: Hincapie slaloms down the left and wins a corner. Rice takes, but not before VAR orders the referee over to ensure Rice has placed the dead-ball in the quadrant. What a faff. The resulting corner is a further waste of everyone’s time.
38 min: One simple long batter down the inside-left channel and Gyokeres is away. He cuts into the box but shanks his shot. The ball breaks to Eze, who teams up with Saka to roll the ball to Timber, racing in from the right. Timber chops his way past Chalobah, lovely skill, only to scuff a weak effort into Sanchez’s arms.
36 min: The physio pokes Palmer’s knee awhile, then gives him the OK to continue. He’s immediately back in the thick of the action, combining with Pedro down the middle, an intricate move that nearly splits the Arsenal defence. But not quite.
34 min: Palmer goes down off the ball. A worrying sign for Chelsea, as he’s been their most dangerous player so far. He glances over to the bench with a glum expression.
33 min: The pace drops a bit for the first time in a while.
31 min: Zubimendi plays a ludicrous hospital-infused backpass to Raya, with Pedro close by. There’s just enough juice on the ball to reach the keeper, Raya hacking clear, but Pedro nearly gets there, and is within his rights to challenge. He catches Raya, but there are no hard feelings. Not between Raya and Pedro, anyway. Raya and Zubimendi, that might be another matter.
29 min: Rice opens his body and aims a curler towards the top-right corner. Always wide, always high. The home crowd cheer noisily nonetheless. Afternoon Pints + Goal = Happy Punters.
28 min: Chelsea have enjoyed 56 percent of possession so far, and are edging the xG by a whopping 0.01, their score 0.38 to Arsenal’s 0.37. On Sky, Gary Neville thinks the visitors have a goal in them, which isn’t something he would have said during either leg of the recent League Cup semi-final. So there’s a little care package of hope for Chelsea fans. It’s not a very big one, but we have tied it up in a pretty bow.
26 min: Chelsea respond with a bit of probing down both flanks. Arsenal hold their shape. It’s what they do.
24 min: Rice delivers. Not so good. Chelsea clear. “Preach on, brothers,” begins Simon McMahon. “That afternoon pint of whisky is one of the great joys of modern living. Christ knows I’ve needed it this season as a Dundee United supporter.”
23 min: That’s the eighth own goal scored for Arsenal in their last 21 games. And let’s see if that stat gets bumped further, because they’ve just won another corner in short order, this time down the left.
GOAL! Arsenal 1-0 Chelsea (Saliba 21)
The corner’s sent in long from the right. Gabriel wins a header at the far stick. He sends the ball back across the face of goal. Saliba flicks it on further. It clanks off Sarr, who didn’t know much about it, and into the net. As simple as that! Saliba’s header has been deemed on target, so he gets the award.
20 min: Saka sends Timber down the right. Timber wins a corner. There’s the usual Gunneresque pause, then …
19 min: Palmer’s work down the right causes more bother in the Arsenal box. He wins a corner, which comes in from the left, and is left by Hincapie to ripple the side netting. That’s calm defending, because any intervention may have led to an own goal.
17 min: Sanchez hasn’t been on the Afternoon Pints. I’m pretty sure of that. But if you were a bit more cynical … because now he passes out to Rice, and is very fortunate Saka and Gyokeres overplay coming back towards the box and run the ball out for a goal kick. Dearie me. Sanchez is having a nightmare, but he’s got away with it so far. It surely can’t last.
15 min: Eze, just inside the Chelsea half, spots Sanchez way out of his box and creams a shot goalwards. Sanchez ambles back, a little bit too casually, and while he scoops the ball away from the top-right corner, he swats it behind for a corner. Well, it should be a corner, but the linesman doesn’t spot it and waves play on. It was miles out. Arsenal fume. Sanchez with all the hits already.
14 min: James swings a glorious low cross in from the right. The Arsenal defence all over the shop again. But Pedro doesn’t anticipate the ball coming in so sweetly. Had he made the run, he’d have been slotting.
12 min: Not quite sure what the Arsenal defenders were up to there. They’ve not been their usual selves of late, having buckled against Wolves, and allowed Randal Kolo Muani to score one-and-a-half goals in the North London derby. And that wasn’t great.
10 min: Palmer back on the left! His gadding about is causing come consternation in the Arsenal ranks, and this run down the wing draws a foul from Saka. The free kick’s swung in, and drops to Sarr, six yards out and level with the left-hand post. Had that fallen to an experienced attacker, it was surely 1-0 to Chelsea. But the defender on full debut can’t sort his body shape out and slashes wide left. Big chance.
8 min: Sanchez looks super-jittery. Not for the first time in his career, to be fair. He plays a dangerous ball out from his box down the left channel, hoping to find Caicedo. Saka nearly nicks it. Again, had he done so, Sanchez and Chelsea would have been in a world of pain.
7 min: Palmer’s switched back to the right flank. He crosses, but fails to find a team-mate. Arsenal counter, Saka probing down the right and cutting back for Zubimendi, who leans back and hoicks over from distance. The game slowly beginning to open up.
5 min: Sanchez, with the ball at his feet just outside his own box, decides to fall over like a toddler. Or a sports journalist at 4.30pm on a Friday. Backwards he topples, and Gyokeres nearly steals the ball off him. Had the striker managed to do so, he’d be rolling into an empty net. But Sanchez recovers his poise, if not his dignity, to sweep clear. Nearly one of the great goalkeeping nightmares.
4 min: A fairly shapeless start, actually. “The best pints are Thursday night.” Hello Ian McCourt, formerly of this parish. “Or about 1.30pm on a Friday.”
2 min: A mid-octane start to the game. No real shape yet, though it’s obvious that Palmer is prowling the left wing today, opposite to his usual beat.
Arteta and Rosenior embrace warmly … let’s see how long that cross-capital bonhomie lasts … and Arsenal get the ball rolling.
The teams are out … and it’s a cracking derby atmosphere. Everyone a few Afternoon Pints in, I’ll be bound. The best kind of pint? It’s a good type of pint. Anyway, Arsenal are in their world-famous red shirts with white sleeves. Chelsea could be running out in a blue version of that, but their old boss from the 1930s, David Calderhead, didn’t like the sound of the idea when his pal Tom Webster, a cartoonist for the London Evening Standard, suggested it to him during a round of golf. So Webster took it to Herbert Chapman instead, and here we all are. Chelsea are in their equally storied royal blue, and would anyone change any of this today? Doubt it somehow. We’ll be off in a minute or two!
Mikel Arteta’s turn to talk to Sky. “We know playing at the Emirates, the crowd are fully behind the team in every action … we know what we have to do … regardless of any other opponent, the focus is on us … with the players [Chelsea] have they can play in different combinations … we are very aware of that … we want to exploit their weaknesses.”
Liam Rosenior speaks to Sky Sports. “We’re in a decent shape … we’ve created a really good connection with the players … but for a few lapses of concentration it would be ten wins out of 12 and would put us in a really good spot … we have many games to go and improvements to make … overall it’s been a decent start for me and my staff … we have different ways to play and different shapes … those two games in the League Cup were very early when I came in … we had a lot of injuries … those team-sheets were very different to today’s team-sheet.”
Pre-match reading. And plenty of it.
Arsenal are unchanged from last weekend’s North London derby. Well, if it ain’t broke. Club captain Martin Ødegaard and Ben White miss out altogether.
Chelsea are coming off the back of a disappointing 1-1 home draw with Burnley, and make two changes. One is enforced, with Wesley Fofana suspended; Mamadou Sarr, making his Premier League debut, takes his place. Meanwhile Jorrel Hato comes in for Malo Gusto, who drops to the bench.
The teams
Arsenal: Raya, Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Hincapie, Rice, Zubimendi, Eze, Saka, Trossard, Gyokeres.
Subs: Kepa, Mosquera, Jesus, Martinelli, Norgaard, Madueke, Havertz, Calafiori, Lewis-Skelly.
Chelsea: Sanchez, James, Sarr, Chalobah, Hato, Caicedo, Santos, Palmer, Fernandez, Neto, Pedro.
Subs: Jorgensen, Acheampong, Tosin, Badiashile, Gusto, Lavia, Garnacho, Delap, Guiu.
Referee: Darren England
VAR: John Brooks
Preamble
Yesterday evening, this happened …
… and now the table looks like this …
… so Arsenal will be feeling the pressure all right, even though they’re on a three-game winning run in this particular fixture, which includes a record-breaking 5-0 win, and haven’t lost to Chelsea for ten matches in all competitions, a sequence that stretches back to August 2021. But that’s the unique pressure of the title race for you. Arsenal dealt with all of these emotions last weekend against Spurs wonderfully; against Wolves a few days previously, not so much. Let’s see which way they go today. Kick-off is at 4.30pm GMT. It’s on!
