Arsenal were held to a 1-1 draw against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday, in a disappointing result despite coming back from behind late on.
There’s no denying that things could have been much worse in the end. Bernd Leno’s heroics first kept Arsenal in the game, then prevented Wolves regaining the lead in the latter stages.
However, in truth, those chances only came about as the Gunners threw everyone forward in search of a winner. Wolves created very little before the last 10 minutes.
The problem was that Arsenal conceded a soft goal and then couldn’t break their opponents down for most of the 90 minutes, not that they conceded a couple of chances at the end.
Let’s have a look at our individual player ratings for the match.
1Goalkeeper and Defence
Bernd Leno 9
Leno had an excellent game, making crucial saves and playing the ball out from the back with 95% accuracy. Arsenal could easily have lost this one without him, but winning points you could and should have lost is exactly what you want from your goalkeeper.
Hector Bellerin 6.5
Bellerin wasn’t perfect, and he was dispossessed too often, but he still did pretty well with very little help from his teammates. Alex Iwobi spent too much time helping out in the middle before he went off, and no one spent much time on the right afterwards.
Two of Arsenal’s best chances fell to the Spaniard’s left foot, which was pretty unfortunate. His technique wasn’t terrible for a full-back on his weaker side, but he couldn’t get either on target. He did create Arsenal’s best chance of the match though, a sitter which Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang somehow managed to miss.
Shkodran Mustafi 6
Mustafi and Holding had pretty contrasting matches, where they only did about half of their job. Mustafi’s defensive work was pretty solid, but his bizarre attempts at long passes forward gave away possession far too often.
Rob Holding 5.5
Meanwhile, Holding let opponents in on goal too often, but he did well enough on the ball.
He might be feeling the effects of having played so many matches for Arsenal recently, only missing one game in almost two months since coming into the team. The international break is certainly welcome in that regard.
Sead Kolasinac 4.5
In fairness to Kolasinac, the circumstances of this match weren’t great. Only recently back from injury after months out, and with no support from Aubameyang up against some pacy counter attacks, it was always going to be a difficult game.
That said, he really underperformed in this one. The most notable problem was in the air, where he won just 22%(!) of his aerial duels.
Things weren’t too much better on the ground though, with one tackle, no interceptions and no clearances. He didn’t make any chances at the other end either. Let’s hope this was a one-off as he fully adjusts to Emery’s style.
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