How Saka and Smith-Rowe continue to breathe life into a disjointed system
Arsenal 2-0 Newcastle Breakdown
Arsenal came out of Saturday’s lunchtime encounter with Newcastle unscathed and with a convincing xG score (2.6-0.2) to back up their winning performance. However, mixed with some of the brighter moments were plenty of staler ones that seem to be ever-present in Arteta’s attempts to breakdown deep blocks.
So, here’s a breakdown of some passages from the game – both good and bad – that highlight the ways in which things aren’t quite falling into place, as well as how Saka and Smith-Rowe continue to raise the level of Arsenal’s attack.
The Bad
For the most part, Arteta has constructed quite rigid attacking setups at Arsenal. He wants every single pass and movement to be as precise and perfect as possible. However, the opposite has often been the result – even in plenty of Arsenal’s winning performances. Here was no different for much of the first hour.
This attention to detail is why my analysis of the below unedited passages will be thorough, as many minor details often recur throughout.
This example shows a U-shaped pattern to circulation that was very much present throughout the toughest periods of attacking play, as well as in many other matches I’ve seen lately. Possibly the most damaging aspects of these passages, though, are the speed and the relative movement away from the ball, which are both aspects that should, by now, be showing significant signs of progression.
1st passage:
After some brief side-to-side play, one slight negative here – and the first sign of a potential collision – is that Tavares and Lokonga move towards the same angle when trying to receive across.
Whilst this could be completely strategic given Gabriel’s closed-body stance on the ball, it only does enough to draw across two Newcastle players that wouldn’t be involved in defending tightly down Arsenal’s right side. Ideally, Tavares would be counteracting Lokonga’s drop by running into depth instead, so to exploit the genuine wide space.
In any case, when the ball comes back across, the play slows down as the temporary right back, Ødegaard, receives deep and into feet.
Playing into the feet of the fullback is usually a way that is slow for wide progression as the angles are cut in half by being so wide, and the player is having to receive ball-facing. Usually a way of avoiding this and getting the fullback on the ball goal-facing is via wall passes using inside players, but there were very few attempts to do this. And, in other games this season, there has certainly been a reluctance to execute prime wall-passing opportunities due to the lack of tempo to the passing.
Ahead of Ødegaard, as highlighted below, Tomiyasu’s own movement is quite passive – a triggered underlap through the channel, even if not found by the Norwegian, would’ve allowed him to loop back from the blind-side to better receive to feet. In his current drifting position towards the face of the fullback, he’s inaccessible.
There’s then the added presence of Smith-Rowe, who’s rotated with Aubameyang by coming central. However, he is also in a strange place to receive, as his movement is not triggered by Saka’s simultaneous run, nor does it happened to be opened by it. He doesn’t appear to be aiming to connect the ball into a goal-facing Partey (just deep of him), either.
As Smith-Rowe carries his momentum through to the halfspace channel, into a space he could’ve co-ordinated an attack into earlier, Ødegaard shuts off forward play by turning back.
On the far-side, though, is one of many half-chances to shift gears and be more direct against a very narrow Newcastle shape. Tavares and whoever was up against the opposition’s nearest fullback often had a 2v1, and on the ball-near side, the ‘right back’, as well as Ben White, often had plenty of time and space to field the ball diagonally across.
The missing part was the movement. A player in Ødegaard’s situation facing across to the far side with time and space is usually a trigger for joint runs, but Aubameyang remains on his opponent’s blind-side rather than ducking inside to draw the space for Tavares to run in on the overlap.
And, just to show that the intent to move play more directly to Tavares was there, Gabriel targets him immediately after receiving the ball.
Although the contrast in directions between Lokonga and Tavares helps the latter receive in space, the delay through additional passes, and the fact Tavares is receiving closer to the middle third than the final third, affords Newcastle time to shift.
So, when the ball eventually reaches Tavares, he’s forced into a very tightly marked 2-man exchange, which is what Arsenal often limit themselves to in wide areas more than they should.
The lack of a 3rd man is then blatant due to the lack of intensity in either Smith-Rowe’s or Ødegaard’s attempts to move across.
Albeit a small problem in a situation where Tavares likely would’ve struggled to get a clean pass off anyway, it’s indicative of the lack of intensity in movement from players left on the ball-far side.
Once again, Arsenal are forced to recycle in a U shape.
This time, the wide pulling movement from Ødegaard is much more dangerous as the tempo of short passes to transport the ball across had increased in Arsenal’s ‘W-W’ (2-3; 2-3) shape.
With 3 men around the ball, the situation is far more positive, but there is yet again a misunderstanding of who should attack which spaces as Smith-Rowe and Tomiyasu push towards the same channel.
Although Tomiyasu is aware enough to notice this and stop in his tracks, he’s then cutting another teammate out of play (Partey), and his static position is uninviting and therefore only serves to congest the space Saka has on the cut-in.
Given Smith-Rowe’s nominal position, he should be backing up to attack the central lane so that Tomiyasu can continue his run and at least pin open the midfield space for Saka.
Even away from that, as highlighted in the top left of the picture below, Lokonga and Tavares (off-screen) are static and glued together despite the structure demanding the common triangular setup that would see somebody else attack the space Smith-Rowe isn’t.
That becomes all the more damaging when Saka moves inwards. The aforementioned lack of pre-emptive forward movement on the far side means nobody is even attempting to offer between the lines for Saka.
The resulting counterattack, which involved Joelinton offering to link short whilst Wilson went route 1 was a common approach from Newcastle, but Arsenal were at least quite ruthless in their handling of turnovers.
2nd passsage:
Continuing with the examples of U-shaped circulation, we see slightly better near-sided spacing from the inside players but still a lack of urgency to form the ideal spacing on the far-side.
This is also another right-sided passage where Tomiyasu’s initial push forwards is halfway to being passive, and so his continued movement is incredibly reactionary rather than instinctive to the system.
Especially if he’d known without having to scan that Aubameyang would be dropping short, he could’ve made a run into depth, but he was unaware so his eventual push was delayed.
Subsequently, Aubameyang’s very short ball-facing drop to the ball wasn’t in knowledge of a pinned space that was waiting to exploited, it was simply an exchange for the sake of exchanging the ball.
The only potential for exploitation of space was through drawing Shelvey (central midfielder inside of him) slightly across so that his square exchange with Saka could encourage him to push into the slightly stretched midfield gap.
But, as ever, the finite details failed to come to fruition. Instead of cushioning the ball further inside, Aubameyang’s return straight and into Saka’s weaker foot meant he couldn’t exploit the space and so was easily pressed backwards by Shelvey.
That being said, even if Saka had found space, Smith-Rowe, as seen below, was still nowhere close to being able to aid Tavares’ shouts for a switch.
As play continued down the right, we got a further look at more individual limitations. Ødegaard – whom I wrote about earlier this year – has an unfortunate knack for limiting his own ball-playing angles.
By carrying the ball forwards with the outside of his boot instead of keeping over it with the inside of his boot, the speed at which he can release the ball to near-sided angles is delayed, and any pass to the far side requires an extra, more drastic cut-in touch to set himself up.
In this case, he can’t capitalise on a good set of runs that pinned the halfspace open for Saka. And, with the added fact he’s taking a long time to scan the whole pitch, he’s not fully in tune with the movement.
Then, after cutting in, despite Smith-Rowe having finally pushed through the halfspace channel to pin the space for Tavares, Tavares himself isn’t on the same wavelength. So, instead of attacking the space in the box behind the wide midfielder, he stands still, at which point Ødegaard forces a central ball that doesn’t pay off.
These consistent break downs in movement and exchanges are what obstruct Arsenal from breaking down wide areas as consistently as they can. They’re arguably also a mark against what Arteta has been working so hard to ingrain for so long.
An argument in favour of slow play down one side is that it can draw an opponent across to allow for a quick release to the far side, but the above shows that the team isn’t in tune with this sort of approach. As a result, U-shaped ball circulation continues and play slows down.
In the 1st half, according to Stats Zone, the top 3 passing exchanges were:
Gabriel to White (16 times)
Tomiyasu to White (16)
White to Tomiyasu (15)
The Good
The driving force behind Arsenal’s most incisive plays were Smith-Rowe and Saka – best shown when they were able to connect with one another.
In the starting shape, they are so far distant from one another, so it’s not much surprise that the speed of interplay is slower in the final third. As much of a creative force as Ødegaard can be, his operation speed and the pace at which he wants to play are unideal given the lack of runs that are made specifically for him and the restrictions he has positionally in having to stick to one side.
Saka
In Saka’s case, he provided some very positive runs for Lokonga that weren’t being offered to Ødegaard on the opposite side.
One of the more notable aspects of these runs from the blind-side was that Lokonga had a lot of space in front since Newcastle’s wide midfielder on that side, Ryan Fraser, dropped into a wing-back position unlike Allan Saint-Maximin on the other side. So, the added space made playing in those runs a bit more inviting from Lokonga’s perspective.
It’s a side that Arsenal didn’t exploit as much as they could’ve done throughout, even away from the potential switches.
When Arsenal applied further pressure, then, Smith-Rowe was quick to assume better inside positions when Fraser had settled into a back-five, as shown below.
Smith-Rowe
The biggest difference Smith-Rowe made was the pace he injected into otherwise static streams of play. With the inverted wide positions he took up when the ball moved short to the left wing, he was willing to offer ball-facing but to take the ball on the in-step.
Particularly against a wing where there are predominantly just 3 Newcastle defenders guarding the wide exchanges, as opposed to 4, this change of gears helps to free him of his opposite number. It also inspires quicker play from everyone else involved – it’s a simple yet great example of upping the tempo.
By being so active in his movement following the first-time pass, Lokonga knows he has to follow suit to capitalise on the opportunity Smith-Rowe is forging.
Unfortunately, in the above example, Partey’s movement forwards centrally saw his marker backwards press onto Smith-Rowe, so he could do little in the end.
Another very simple example of Smith-Rowe’s movement and subtlety came after the 1st goal.
The initial square exchange doesn’t seem like much, and was one that didn’t pay off in the 1st half because nothing was done following it. However, here, the continuous stream of movement he provides by circling to the blind-side of his opposite number invites Ødegaard to replicate the move, which sees him connect play into Partey for once.
Smith-Rowe’s continued drift inside to establish the diamond around the ball optimises the passing angles but, more importantly, stretches the midfield channels unlike before. Willock is drawn further towards the centre whilst Shelvey recovers there, too, having followed Ødegaard short.
The end result isn’t much of note but the progression and the spaces created were much greater than what was seen before down the right side, including in many 2nd half spells up until that point.
Saka and Smith-Rowe
Undoubtedly the pièce de résistance, though, was the opening goal, where both Saka and Smith-Rowe managed to combine down the left.
1-0 (Saka, 56’):
A huge positive of Saka’s movement across the front 5 compared to others was how active he was in avoiding congesting spaces. Previous examples showed Smith-Rowe and others staying put in the highlighted shape in the top right, but Saka was keen to avoid the congestion by rotating well into positions anywhere across the 5 lanes. In this case, he actually managed to take up positions in all 5 lanes.
The seamlessness of his movement helped in his subsequent rotation with Aubameyang, which also restored the right spacing and numbers out wide on the left.
As soon as it reached Smith-Rowe in his inverted wide position, that’s where the tempo quickened. Everything to do with him is about setting, passing and moving. And, not only that, but also appreciating the effectiveness of simple wide rotations.
A pass down the line, here, isn’t going to create an instant breakthrough because Saka is receiving with his back to goal and is under pressure. However, the sustained pace of movement and the angles that are explored help create space between them and their markers.
Smith-Rowe’s own marker is wary of the ball, which now means his inside shift is on his opponent’s blind-side, thus making it easier for him to free himself up.
This time, also, there is a better understanding of spacing as Smith-Rowe acknowledges Tavares by holding his position short in the triangle.
In continuation of exploiting these individual battles, Saka, as ever, smartly hesitates before releasing the short ball so to be able to spring off his right foot and onto the blind-side of his opponent.
With Smith-Rowe setting, passing and moving at a continued speed – as he attempts to create his own passing lane beyond his man – it also allows Tavares to find Saka whilst he’s still making his run.
And, thanks to a brilliant bit of awareness and a great finish, the work paid off.
The cherry on the cake was the 2nd goal, not only for its quality in execution, but in the simple way that it involved enough men to match Newcastle’s numbers down their more congested side.
Albeit not Saka or Smith-Rowe this time, Martinelli’s similar injection of pace in his movement is what acts on the numerical match, here, and capitalises on the way the space is pinned.
Conclusion
It was a truly comfortable win for Arsenal, and though the positives came from setups that the system allowed for, it also felt like ass though it restricted the team in many ways.
The understanding between players, the intensity of the positioning across the pitch, the timing of the runs, and the number of players actively involved in each play remains something that should be of concern, especially given how far into Arteta’s tenure we are.
As much as the passivity of these attacks is something I would like to argue in favour of, it’s recurs in game-chasing situations where the switch in intensity and commitment is needed, which suggests that this approach is far from what Arteta intends when attacking.
Although the run of form, outcomes and league position-wise, sheds a very positive light, I’m yet to be convinced by the dynamics of the attacking approach when Arsenal are not able to transition or rebound their way to breakthroughs. In the meantime, the hope will be that the process catches up with the results, otherwise there’s the potential for points to start being dropped.
So, whilst the semantics of the system continue to be fine-tuned, the solution might be as simple as ensuring Smith-Rowe and Saka are given the freedom and closeness to build attacks together again. If that means Lacazette comes back in for an inconsistent Aubameyang, who can’t even nail his movement at the moment, again, then it might help temporarily combat the huge issues relative to the speed of play up that end of the pitch. At least in these types of matches, anyway.