Nottingham Forest manager Oliver Glasner suggested on Sunday that Arsenal’s centre-back partnership might be the best in the world, with Mikel Arteta also praising the pairing.
Arsenal won Sunday’s game against Nottingham Forest thanks to a late goal from Noni Madueke, but the Gunners were only in a position to win the game because of the excellent work by Ezri Konsa and Gabriel Magalhaes at the other end of the pitch.
Konsa and Gabriel made a few vital interventions to keep the scores level until the 80th minute, and they had to make more key stops in the dying embers of the game to prevent an equaliser.
Speaking afterwards, Forest manager Oliver Glasner suggested there aren’t many better pairings in world football.
“Ezri Konsa and Gabriel are possibly the best centre-back pairing in the world at the moment,” Glasner claimed.
Mikel Arteta didn’t disagree, telling the media that Konsa and Gabriel were one of the primary reasons why Arsenal won the game.
“The win was not possible without them, because they have so much quality and physicality, having to constantly deal with what we predicted to be 50 balls in the air,” Arteta said. “I don’t know how many they had, but it would’ve been very close to that.
“And it’s not only that, it’s what happens after that ball and the consequences from that. To be on it constantly, every action delivered, is very tough.
“When you think it’s done, Wood and Hudson-Odoi come in and they start to have a different problem. Now you are man-to-man with the two centre-backs. But that’s the Premier League, and the quality of it which makes it the best league in the world.”
With William Saliba ruled out for the first few months of the season, there were obviously major concerns from the Arsenal fanbase about how the team would cope.
Yet the addition of Konsa has been a relatively seamless process. Saliba perhaps still brings an extra spark in possession that the England international is yet to fully replicate, but he’s been excellent in one-on-one situations.
Given Cristhian Mosquera’s recent injury issues, it’s hard to imagine what the defence would have looked like without Konsa joining the club.
Rather than scrambling for solutions, Arsenal have had a settled defence with four clean sheets in seven Premier League matches and another two in two in the Champions League.
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