Analysis: Manchester City 2-1 Arsenal

Analysis of the fine margins which defined a huge game in the Barclays Women's Super League on Saturday, with insight from both managers

Goals from Lauren Hemp and Chloe Kelly helped down Arsenal on Saturday. Image: Cameron Smith / Sportimage

It’s easy to look at Manchester City’s victory over Arsenal and put it down to too many errors made by the latter in a first half in which City head coach Gareth Taylor believes his side could have been “four or five” up in, rather than the 2-0 lead they held going into the break.

But the details from both sides which led to how the game panned out were visible from the first moments, and it was only four minutes when Lauren Hemp stole in behind the entire Arsenal defence to set the tone for what was to come.

To the surprise of many, Jonas Eidevall stuck with a less conventional back three than we are used to seeing from Arsenal, who primarily have always played in a back four. Whatever his reasonings behind it in the Continental Cup on Wednesday, it worked, though he hinted today it was more about what minutes certain players could partake in the game for off the back of those 120 gruelling minutes in midweek.

“There are a lot of things we have to consider when we do that and a lot of things you guys don’t know either, like how many minutes we have certain players available for and what does that do to team selection,” said the Arsenal boss.

“I understand that, I am probably the only one in the room with the full picture in my choices. I don’t regret it given all the information I had beforehand.”

But it simply didn’t work. Whether it was just performance level on the day or Manchester City being better equipped second time around to deal with it, only they will know, but none of Arsenal’s back three looked comfortable of their roles, while Noelle Maritz - who replaced Laura Wienrother - had a particularly tough day up against Hemp, as did Steph Catley against a much more herself looking Chloe Kelly.

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“They still press from out to in with their wide players and get your centre-halves onto their weak foot,” said Eidevall. “We do the same thing. What they did today to deal with our wide players was to flatten out their midfield, they changed during the game on Wednesday to do this too. Instead of just playing Hasegawa as a lone 6, they drop one of their 8s. They do a little like Liverpool men when they won the league and flatten their midfield.

“That is why they used Angeldahl and Coombs today because they can run. But when we play the ball out to our wide players the difference from Wednesday was that no player was coming onto the ball because their full-back is occupied with another one of our other players. We couldn’t take our first touch forward and build our attacks from that.

“Today one player from their central midfield leaves that area and we have a midfielder and a full-back on our wide player so now we need additional passes from the spaces they are leaving. We need to play the ball to our six and play diagonally to the 10. We didn’t get our 6s into that position so the only option our wide player has is to play the ball to our 10 and into a one v one situation. We lose that situation a lot of times today. For us structurally, we needed to have more players inside centrally to move and open up City’s organisation. We could not do it because we lacked the positioning.”