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.
Strikers
Alexandre Lacazette 4
Lacazette did work hard, chased down a lot of last causes and actually had the highest pass accuracy of any starter. However, he didn’t threaten Leicester’s goal at any point, whether by a shot of his own or creating a chance for a teammate.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang 4
Aubameyang was the only player on the Arsenal team to create more than one chance throughout the 90 minutes. The problem was that he didn’t have any to take himself. Like Lacazette, the striker’s work rate was very good, especially after Arsenal went down to 10 men. It just wasn’t enough.