Arsenal suffered another damaging defeat at the hands of Leicester City on Sunday, thanks partly to a soft first-half red card, but not helped by a poor overall performance.
Unai Emery clearly had a gameplan to sit back and hit Leicester on the counter-attack, but the players weren’t able to execute on that. The Gunners’ counters were toothless and they didn’t look any more defensively solid despite all the men behind the ball.
Given that it clearly wasn’t working, tactical changes needed to be made, but by half-time it was already too late. Ainsley Maitland-Niles was sent off after picking up two yellow cards for his only two fouls in the match, and Arsenal never looked like winning after that.
Leicester made the breakthrough in the 59th minute through an impressive early cross and headed finish, before Jamie Vardy padded his stats a bit with two goals in the final five minutes.
Let’s have a look at our individual player ratings for the match.
Midfield
Lucas Torreira 4
Torreira pressed the Leicester players well, and he had a few good moments despite being on the end of a number of very physical challenges. He wasn’t particularly effective in Arsenal’s counter-attacking attempts though, and he lost possession as easily as everybody else in the team.
Granit Xhaka 4
Similar to Torreira, Xhaka had a few good moments breaking up play, but he was simply too ineffective in possession. Even his long balls, usually so effective, were very inaccurate on the day. Arsenal should have done better with a couple of good set-pieces from the midfielder though.
Alex Iwobi 3
Iwobi didn’t see as much of the ball as he would’ve liked, and he hit his one big chance straight at Kasper Schmeichel. The game certainly could have been a lot different had that gone in before the red card.
Henrikh Mkhitaryan 2
Mkhitaryan offered nothing to Arsenal, bar one interception and a couple of clearances. His passing was poor, his dribbling was poor, he didn’t win individual duels, create chances or take any of his own. He needed to come off earlier.