Arsenal and Newcastle United could only manage a goalless draw, and while Newcastle will be happy to leave London with a point, Arsenal may be disappointed.
Should you be looking for confirmation that this Premier League season has caught people a little off-guard, the reaction to Arsenal still being top of the table into the new year tells you all you need to know. The team that has been top of the Premier League since August 20, who went into their game against Newcastle United having dropped just five Premier League points all season, seem to have brought about a feeling of denial in a lot of people.
The realisation that Arsenal are a good team has taken five months to slowly percolate through to the collective consciousness.
Newcastle will emerge from this tetchy, scrappy goalless draw the happier of the two teams. If they arrived at The Emirates Stadium with a plan to prioritise coming away with an unbeaten league record which stretches back to August 31, they accomplished that mission.
Arsenal may rue not converting a dominant second-half performance into more chances and a handball shout in the last seconds of stoppage-time which came to nothing, adding to an atmosphere that was rapidly souring as a result of some timely Newcastle time-wasting throughout the previous five minutes.
By half-time, the most telling statistic was that there’d been more than twice as many yellow cards as there had been shots on target. The best chance of the half came right at its death, and pointedly didn’t involve one. Instead, Joelinton headed wide for Newcastle when he really should have scored, but this would have been a false representation of a first half which was appropriately represented at the interval by a goalless scoreline.
None of this is to say that it was bad football. Joelinton’s miss was a little careless and the first half would be better described as ‘scrappy’ than anything else, but the tempo was high and the passing was crisp. These were, ultimately, two teams cancelling each other out. The most notable statistic of the half was those five yellow cards, but it was somewhat surprising to hear Gary Neville repeating the strange viewpoint that ‘the referee has created a problem for himself’ by giving out a couple of them quite early on.
Gary should really have explained further how this is supposed to work. Are red card offences downgraded to yellows for the first 15 minutes? Can you literally get away with anything beyond a…
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