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.
Substitutes
Laurent Koscielny 3
As mentioned previously, Koscielny did bail out Sokratis on a couple of occasions, but he also played some surprisingly lazy passes and let more players dribble past him than he stopped with a tackle. He was also caught just under the ball once again for Leicester’s first goal, a frustratingly common occurrence in his play.
Matteo Guendouzi 4
Bringing on Guendouzi for Mkhitaryan was a bit of a bizarre decision. Mkhitaryan certainly needed to come off, but it wasn’t as if Arsenal were really lacking defensive-minded midfielders. The Frenchman completed a few passes and unsurprisingly didn’t provide the goal Arsenal needed.
Eddie Nketiah 4
In his 11 minutes on the pitch with Arsenal pretty much resigned to their fate, this wasn’t exactly the best environment for Nketiah to prove himself. He had one big opportunity that required a top tackle from Harry Maguire, but in fairness, the teenager was offside anyway.
The young striker’s passes all found their targets and he did win Arsenal a late corner, but it still wasn’t the impact he’d have hoped to have.