Arsenal 2-1 Everton: Five Talking Points

Arsenal beat Everton 2-1 at the Emirates yet again as they rounded off a perfect week in all the competitions. The victory means the Gunners go on top of the league table with the Manchester derby yet to be played on Sunday.

Two goals in quick succession from Olivier Giroud and Laurent Koscielny left Everton haggard as Arsenal dominated proceedings in the first half. A quick counter-attack followed by an ambitious attempt from Ross Barkley took a cruel deflection from Gabriel before finding its way to the back of the net.

Let’s take a look at the talking points from the game:

An eye-catching display from the North-London outfit provided them with a much clearer picture to their style of play. In their game vs Bayern Munich in mid-week, they surrendered possession which is one of their key facets of the game or as we thought it was. Even with 30% possession, the Gunners managed to get 13 shots on goal which speaks volumes about their creative midfielders.

This coupled with a solid backline has been the key to Arsenal’s success in recent weeks. At a certain moment today, the Gunners scored 10 goals without conceding and a cruelly deflected goal was the only thing that beat them in 315 minutes of gameplay. If only they could keep these performances going, Arsenal would find themselves at the top of the table, come the end of the season.

Often labelled as a dangerous side to face, the Toffees find themselves on a poor run of games having lost their last two games. Even though, both the games were against an opposition placed higher than them in the points table. They were far from their original self and have been poor when it comes to creating and finishing chances. Arsenal on the other hand, have always been wary of Roberto Martinez’s tactics against them.

Martinez has always found it easy to play Arsenal in recent meetings by injecting pace into his side and making it difficult for the Gunners to settle on the ball. But today, it was a totally different Everton side that stepped on to the pitch. Lack of urgency to push the Arsenal players into errors was the main reason why Everton couldn’t find an equalizing goal and eventually they lost the game.

A player who’s in sparkling form at the moment is Olivier Giroud. 5 goals in 7 games after being dropped in favour of Theo Walcott shows that he’s determined to prove his critics wrong. An impressive goalscoring return convinced Wenger to start him up front for this game.

All said and done, everytime Giroud was criticized and deemed as a liability to the squad he’s come on top of it all to show that he’s capable of leading the line for Arsenal. Wenger still sees Theo Walcott as Arsenal’s first choice striker and rightly so. But Giroud has a unique element to offer to certain games that Theo can’t and at other times he’s been hugely effective in his new role as a ‘super-sub’.

Two seasons ago Everton were a formidable side with a Europa League place under their belt. But because of their hectic European Campaign, Everton failed to perform in all the competitions and had a dismal season. Having no such distraction this time around, Roberto Martinez had promised to replicate the heroics again and their bright start to this season supports his claim.

Neglecting a recent dip in form, Everton are a well organised side having adequate resources to grind results out. Their team is based around young players like Ross Barkley, John Stones, Romelu Lukaku amongst others. Even the young academy players have proved to be great replacements to their injured counterparts like Brendan Galloway.

A great side at this moment of time has a great future ahead of them.

For Arsenal the victory brightens their title credentials and with this they finish their week on a high note. The Gunners knew a win would steer them to the summit in the Premier League table, at least for the time being until the Manchester Derby.

Not the prettiest of victories but they got the job done and at the end of the day got three massive points. The difficult run of fixtures has not ended yet as they travel to giant killers Sheffield on Wednesday next week for the Capital One Cup, before a trip to the Liberty Stadium and an all important reverse encounter with Bayern Munich in Germany.