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00:00Right, hello everybody, welcome to ACFC, and Manchester City have just won the Carabao Cup in a game that feels
00:09like it might have been about a bit more than the Carabao Cup.
00:14People are using scary terms like psychological blow, wake-up call, and Tony Adams, but this will not be a
00:22particularly long video.
00:24You can draw your own conclusions about what it might mean for the title race, but you simply look at
00:29this still image here, how Manchester City are arrayed in front of Arsenal when they have the ball,
00:35and you can see that this game, in isolation, was maybe the most straightforward example of manager does job on
00:44other manager.
00:45So, let me show you that job.
00:52And just before we begin, a reminder that ACFC is brought to you by our investment pals at Trading212, hence
00:59why I'm joined by my co-host, Teddy Sheringham here.
01:03Yep, still think that's funny, so there'll be an ad for them later on.
01:07Anyway though, aforementioned, still image comes from very early in the game.
01:11There is zero effort from Manchester City to press Arsenal at the back, but they are, nonetheless, still very high
01:19up the pitch.
01:20There is no pressure on Kepa or Saliba or Gabriel, but everything beyond that is completely shut off.
01:28City have this flat line of four players, quite narrow to guard the centre of the pitch, but of course,
01:35not so narrow that they could then just get passed around.
01:39They're able to move this from left to right as required.
01:43Now this, obviously, is not what Arsenal want at all.
01:46What they want to be able to do when they've got the ball back here is play into either Rice
01:51or Zubomendi so that they can get turned and find a pass into the forward line.
01:56But these four players here completely shut off any central options to find them,
02:01and even if a ball does get through, both Rodri and Bernardo Silva would then jump to stop them getting
02:07turned and playing forward.
02:08And the thinking here from Manchester City is that Declan Rice is a wonderful player, but not in this exact
02:16sort of situation.
02:17He does not like to take the ball under pressure and get turned.
02:20And also, Gabriel and Saliba are wonderful centre-backs, but you would not put mazy dribbles or defence-splitting passes
02:28high up their list of attributes.
02:31So Guardiola reasoned that the tools Arsenal would need to play through this were not in their box.
02:37And you look at it, and it's just the sort of gamble you have to take as a manager to
02:42win a big game.
02:42Like, he might have been totally wrong.
02:45It might have worked for half an hour, and then Arsenal get ahead with a corner, and you're forced to
02:49open up anyway.
02:50But on the day, when you were watching it, it was clearly all working the way he would have wanted
02:56it to.
02:57And as a result of being completely unable to play through this central block, Arsenal had to try and do
03:03something else.
03:04And I'll show you what that was, right?
03:07These are all of Kepa's passes in the game, both successful and unsuccessful.
03:13You can see there's a little handful out to the centre-backs, left and right here, which he almost always
03:18got straight back, by the way.
03:20But then everything else is just long.
03:23It's punted up the field, more often than not, onto this sort of slight right-hand side,
03:28where Havertz could drift, because he's good in the air, to try and challenge for the ball.
03:32This was the only real solution Arsenal could come up with to this problem here.
03:38The problem is, that's obviously a very inaccurate way to play football.
03:42And Man City kept either winning the header first time, or crashing the second balls and just mopping them up.
03:49Like, I've moved everything out of the way for you here, right?
03:51These are all of Kepa's long passes, yes, but these are the outcomes of all those long balls.
03:58The blue ones are where Man City either win the header themselves, or just pick up a loose ball because
04:04it runs through.
04:04And the red one, the red one, is when Arsenal won that header and kept the ball.
04:10This is not a viable solution to the problem they were facing.
04:13And that, or this, right, is it.
04:18That's genuinely all there was to the game.
04:20Like, one of the most astonishing things about it was that it just followed this pattern for 90 minutes.
04:26And that is genuinely quite mad to me, because Arteta is a manager who is famed, and rightly famed,
04:35for his ability to adapt to things in the game as it's happening.
04:39And yet here, the problem was so obvious, but he could devise no solution to it.
04:45There were attempts to get Jokeres in by running the channel, and that sort of worked at the start, but
04:49didn't really yield anything.
04:51There were no changes to the build-up patterns after the half-time break.
04:54Like, this is it in the first half of the game, and this is exactly the same thing in the
04:59second half.
05:00And you won't believe what happens in the second example there.
05:03Here, Kepa doesn't know what to do, and kicks it really long, and Arsenal lose the ball.
05:10Calafiore and Madueke, coming on for Nkappé and Havertz, did not make this situation any easier to navigate.
05:16And by that point, it was 2-0, and it felt like it had gone anyway.
05:20And there are, like, potentially some solutions to this.
05:23Like, you can just be a little bit braver on the ball if you fancy it.
05:26You can have players drop out of that forward line to bounce passes into the people in this line and
05:32allow them to play into the space.
05:33You can drag everything over to one side of the pitch, force the press to join you, and then hit
05:39very brave balls, accurate ones, to players on the other side.
05:43There are answers here beyond simply going long from the goalkeeper and hoping for the best.
05:48However, however, however, however, this is what was bad about Arsenal, right?
05:53But what was good about Man City was not just how they created this situation, which gave them the upper
05:59hand, but how they then took that and built on it.
06:04Friends, one moment, please.
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06:56Yes.
06:56Back to the video.
06:58Because you can look at the XG graph for the game, right?
07:01Arsenal had that little flurry of the James Trafford triple save early on, and then almost nothing afterwards.
07:09But City went 45 minutes without creating a single chance.
07:15Like, genuinely, not one.
07:19Until Semenyo gets the ball on the edge of the box, and what does he want to do?
07:24He wants to run down the side of Arsenal's defence, too narrow for the full-back, so someone else has
07:30to get dragged in there to defend him.
07:32He gets to the byline, he drops it right into the six-yard box.
07:37And you, specifically, you, right there, watching this, you keep that exact thing in mind.
07:43Man City's only real spell in this game, and indeed the spell in which they win the game, was the
07:5020-minute period at the start of the second half.
07:54And I have two, two world-class bits of visual data here to show you how they did that.
08:01Now, first off, this is from the Imperious Cannon stats, right?
08:05And it's basically an on-the-ball involvement graph.
08:09So the average position that player had during that part of the game, and the bigger the circle, the more
08:16touches they got in it.
08:17Now, the way they've done it here, right, is they've divided the game into quarters.
08:21So the first and second halves of the first and second half.
08:26And you can see that for the three of those spells we're not talking about here, it's pretty consistent.
08:32Like, it's 50-50, who is in which half, Rice, Saliba, and Gabriel are the most involved, that sort of
08:38thing.
08:38But this, what I reveal, is the graph from that spell at the start of the second half.
08:45And in it, you can see Arsenal do not see that ball.
08:51And when they do, it is almost entirely in their own defensive third.
08:57They could not get out.
08:59Now, this next bit, right, I'm going to show you with the raw Opta data.
09:03But credit for it actually goes to best account on the internet, Mark Stats.
09:08You produced a wonderful little graphic illustrating the thing.
09:11And this is where I saw this the first time.
09:13These are all of Arsenal's passes from the start of the second half to the moment that second goal goes
09:22in.
09:22It's like over 20 minutes of the match.
09:25They complete three in Manchester City's half.
09:29That is about as up against it as you will ever see a team of this level.
09:35Now, just take a little second to absorb all of this, right?
09:39Only three in Man City's half.
09:41One of them's backwards.
09:41One of them's on the touchline.
09:42It's very not good because, and gird your loins for this,
09:47these are Manchester City's passes in the exact same window of the game.
09:54They are almost never out of Arsenal's half.
09:56They're almost never out of Arsenal's defensive third.
10:00They create four really good chances and score two almost identical goals.
10:07And both of them, if you will remember me telling you to remember the thing from before,
10:13look exactly like that Semenyo chant.
10:16Player drives down the outside of the defence, too narrow for the full-backs to go with.
10:21So in the first case, Trussard gets dragged in there.
10:24And for the second, Rice doesn't do anywhere near enough to stop the cross because, obviously, neither of them are
10:31defenders.
10:31Both times the Man City player gets to the byline.
10:35Both times they resist the urge to smash it low or cut it back and instead float it over the
10:41defender towards the back post.
10:43And both times it is a headed goal.
10:47And thus, just like how in the first half they got that warning with the four-man block and couldn't
10:52do anything to adapt to it,
10:54Arsenal had a warning about this exact goal.
10:58Man City were trying to do this to them and they did not figure out a way to stop that
11:03happening.
11:03And if you, right, you handsome bugger, like, oh, it pains me to actually look at you, it's like staring
11:10at the sun, right?
11:11If you are thinking, well, yeah, okay, that's the what, right?
11:16That's what Manchester City did.
11:18But surely the more interesting thing is the how.
11:21How did they blow Arsenal away in a 20-minute window after spending the entire rest of the game, before
11:29and after,
11:30sitting in quite a conservative, almost negative defensive shape?
11:34And, well, it just comes back to this.
11:38That shape, that block, that defensive pattern that they put in between Arsenal's first and second lines
11:45is very difficult to play through, yes, but it's also quite easy on the energy levels for Man City.
11:53It's not a high press, like, they're not chasing the ball around trying to win it back.
11:58They're letting them play because they don't think Arsenal are good enough to break this down.
12:04And that means when you then come out for the second half with the game still at 0-0,
12:08you've got so much still in the tank just to completely change the tempo,
12:14get right in your opponent's faces, change the entire pattern of the game and catch them out.
12:19And when that second half does start, all of a sudden they were harrying them on the ball.
12:23They were trying to win it back and Arsenal just completely caved in.
12:27And then, after they did that, they just sort of stopped.
12:31Like, they went and won the game and then just settled back into what they've been doing in the first
12:35half
12:36and waited for the final whistle.
12:39Like, honestly, it is one of the most straightforward examples you have seen recently
12:44of manager does job on other manager.
12:47But the thing about football, right, is it still comes down to these little margins.
12:53Like, Arsenal could not play through that city shape,
12:56but if they'd gone and got a set-piece goal, that would have completely opened the match up.
13:02And the opener still only comes because Kepa fumbles that cross,
13:06which, if he doesn't do that, maybe Arsenal see out that period of the game.
13:11And from there, who knows?
13:13But I will say, if you are blaming that result purely on him, right,
13:18and you are missing the much, much bigger picture, which is depicted here.
13:23Like, the sheer impotence of this red line is nothing to do with the goalkeeper.
13:29So, yes, it does feel like every single time someone says Pep Guardiola doesn't care
13:34or has lost it or has retired in his own head,
13:37he seems to pull out one of these performances in a big game.
13:41So, well done to him.
13:43And to Mikel Arteta, your job now, one would assume,
13:47is to make sure that the Carabao Cup is all that they've lost here
13:51because their heads, for example, would be much worse.
13:55And that is, mercifully, all there is for me,
13:57because if you're wondering why I sound like this,
13:59it's not because I was at Wembley watching this game.
14:02I was at St. James' Park watching the Tiny Weird Derby,
14:05and then I got up at 6 o'clock in the morning to start work on this
14:09and get on a train and come to this studio to make this for you.
14:14And also because it's my job, so I don't really have a choice of the matter.
14:17So if you'd like to get me across all the social medias, you can,
14:19and at Adam Cleary, C-L-E-R-Y, we are in the ACFC anniversary week.
14:25It's been one year this week since we launched the channel,
14:28so if we could hit 200,000 subs by Teddy, when that happens,
14:32that would make me really, really happy.
14:35That was funny.
14:36Otherwise, though, Manchester City fans, in the comments, please,
14:39do you think this is a catalyst to go and now win the league
14:41or do something tremendous?
14:43I don't know what it is that you want.
14:45And Arsenal fans, does this now not matter?
14:47I've got at least one Arsenal fan in this office
14:50now pretending he didn't really want this competition in the first place,
14:54even though that's not what he said on Friday.
14:57But all your thoughts, feelings, everything else, very welcome down there.
15:00I do dearly enjoy reading it.
15:01And I will see you, I don't know, soon.
15:06I'm sure I'll think of something.
15:08Goodbye.
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