Why Granit Xhaka shouted at Gabriel as Mikel Arteta reveals who is to blame for Palace defeat

Kaya Kaynak, Arsenal reporter for football.london, looks back on the key moments from Arsenal’s 3-0 loss to Crystal Palace.

The party is ended.

Thomas Partey had had a good few months. Since giving his early Arsenal career a 4/10, the Ghanaian has found a new lease on life in an important role at the base of Mikel Arteta’s midfield. The self-criticism that was so prevalent when he tried to force things in those terrible early December away trips to Manchester United and Everton had vanished, as everything seemed to be flowing smoothly.

He appeared to be confidence in his physique again after a run of months without injury following extra training sessions on specific muscle parts, while his personal life off the pitch was lot more solid as London loosened up from its COVID limitations, as football.london discovered. With a brilliant strike from outside the box, he even helped Ghana secure a spot in the World Cup in Qatar! Is it possible to get any better than that?!

On Monday night, he learned that the response was a loud no. The issue with Partey being so effective at the base of Arsenal’s midfield recently is that teams have realized how crucial he is to the Gunners’ offense. Liverpool tried to take him out of the game last month, but he was too excellent on that night. Partey was unable to recreate the miracle feat this time around as Connor Gallagher relentlessly pressed him throughout his time on the pitch.

On the night, the Ghanaian threw the ball away nine times and was visibly irritated with himself as the fine form he had spent months honing seemed to suddenly forsake him. An abysmal night finished disastrously when he pulled up injured and was unable to track back as Wilfried Zaha surged towards the Arsenal box and won the penalty, thereby putting any faint hope of a comeback out of reach.

Arteta indicated after the game that the prognosis for the injury did not look promising. “I don’t know,” the Spaniard remarked, “but he felt something in the same area where he was injured earlier, so that’s a significant concern.”

The outcome will sting, but as Arteta strode sullenly off the Selhurst Park pitch with his head lowered, the one question going through his mind would have been, ‘how exactly can I replace Thomas Partey?’ The Ghanaian has basically been a one-man midfielder in the six position, with every offensive build up funelling through his wand of a right foot, and finding someone capable of reproducing that will be difficult.

Fortunately for Arteta, he may have found an answer during the final phases of Selhurst Park. Albert Sambi Lokonga considers himself an eight, but his coaches have always maintained that he is more of a six, and this is no different at Arsenal. The Gunners intend for him to be Partey’s long-term replacement, and his cameo on Monday demonstrates why.

In just 19 minutes on the pitch, the Belgian managed three progressive passes to Partey’s two, bringing a level of possession stability that had previously been lacking. His defensive instincts continue to be a source of concern. Let us not forget that Lokonga’s error in front of the back four allowed Palace to take the lead in the reverse fixture at the Emirates in October. But, with Partey likely absent for a few games, Sambi has demonstrated that he may just have what it takes to fill in for him.

Arteta’s risky transfer backfires

From the time the transfer market closed on January 31st, it was abundantly evident that Arsenal was taking a massive gamble.

The Gunners’ failure to add a single player while allowing six of their first-team players to leave (Pablo Mari, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Folarin Balogun, Sead Kolasinac, Calo Chambers, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang) meant they had basically depleted their squad of depth. With just a handful more injuries, their roster would seem pretty thin.

As Kieran Tierney and Nicolas Pepe were forced to miss the game on Monday night due to illness and injury, the gamble they had taken appeared to be backfiring. Mazeed Ogungbo and Marcelo Flores are two extremely exciting young talents who could well go on to have careers in the first team at the Emirates, but as Mikel Arteta saw his side put in a first half performance that was by his own reckoning “unacceptable” turning to the bench and seeing those fresh faces staring back at him would not have filled him with confidence that things could be turned around.

Few positions are more acutely aware of a lack of depth than the center forward position. Alexandre Lacazette scored a hat trick against Brentford B during the international break, but any hope that he would carry that momentum into the competitive arena was swiftly dashed as he headed over Arsenal’s opening cross of the game following a fine cross from Bukayo Saka.

The Frenchman’s goal-scoring record has been so bad this season that if his hold-up play isn’t on point, as it most emphatically wasn’t at Selhurst Park, you have to question his usefulness on the pitch. The issue is that, when Lacazette isn’t doing well, there isn’t much to change in this Arsenal squad, especially after Aubameyang’s departure. Eddie Nketiah wasn’t as bad as he has been in recent cameos, nearly scoring a miraculous consolation with a long-range shot that deflected past the crossbar, but the England under-21 international doesn’t provide enough off the bench.

It’s a problem that’s being felt throughout the Arsenal squad right now, and with injuries to Partey and Tierney, it’s only going to get worse in the coming weeks. When asked about this at full time, Arteta was in no mood to talk about what he doesn’t have, preferring to focus on what he does have.

“It’s what we’ve got,” the Spaniard remarked of his team’s depth. “We lost Kieran, and now we’ve lost Thomas, and that’s it.” We will attempt, as we have done since the beginning of the season, with the players we have. We’ve never had a large team. We can’t come up with any excuses, and we have to look at ourselves and myself again, since it wasn’t good enough.”

While Arteta was delighted to blame himself for Arsenal’s loss to Palace, if Arsenal blows such a fantastic opportunity to qualify for the Champions League, the verdict may not be so kind. Going into the season’s final stretch with such a weak team was always going to be a danger, and as the injuries pile up for the Gunners, it might define their season.

Tavares’ torid period?

Nuno Tavares was taken off after 35 minutes the last time he began a game for Arsenal. He lasted 45 seconds this time, so that’s improvement, right?

All jokes aside, it didn’t appear that much had changed in the Portugal under-21 international’s game in the four months between his two most recent Arsenal appearances. Positional play was his undoing against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup third round back then. Mikel Arteta, 22, could be seen chanting continually “Nuno! Nuno” as he moved casually out of position at the City Ground, and it was the same at Selhurst Park on Monday night.

The carefully maintained equilibrium Arteta has managed to create between Arsenal’s full backs has contributed to their overall success this season. In an ideal scenario, the Gunners’ two wide defenders would work together like a seesaw, with one going forward to overlap and support the attack and the other staying back to drift infield and give cover.

When Takehiro Tomiyasu was in the lineup, this worked perfectly since the Japanese international’s instincts as a center back fit the system perfectly. It’s for this reason why Tavares looked so good when he filled in for Kieran Tierney during an extended stint with the team in October and November.

Recently, the roles had been slightly reversed. Tierney was now urged to defend a little more when the more attack-minded Cedric was brought into the side due to Tomiyasu’s recurrent calf injuries. Perhaps it is only now that we realize what a unicorn the Scottish full back is in that he is equally strong defensively as he is offensively.

Arsenal’s full back setup was put to the test with both Cedric and Tavares on the same side. How can a seesaw function when both riders want to be in the air? Well, we got our response on Monday night…

To be fair to Cedric, he was actually rather good defensively. Wilfried Zaha, who has seemed to have a spring in his step in every match against Arsenal since his move fell through in the summer of 2019, was kept relatively quiet on the night as Palace’s biggest attacking threat came mostly down their right flank.

However, with the former Southampton man in the team, the Arsenal attack has developed a right-sided bias, and as the Gunners looked to funnel the ball forward to their danger men Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka, Tavares’ defensive instincts were called into question, and he was found wanting on numerous occasions. Cedric was out of position after committing to an attack down the right when the ball dropped to Tavares in the left inverted space. He had the option of playing a simple pass, but he unleashed a crazy long-range effort that sent Palace on the counter.

Arsenal got away with it that time, but they were unlucky with the second goal, as Tavares dropped excessively deep and failed to foresee the similarly shaky Gabriel’s error. Arteta rushed fast to administer some stitches after locating the source of the bleed in his back line by putting on Gabriel Martinelli at half time and swapping Granit Xhaka back to the left of defense, but the cut was fatal by that stage.

Xhaka deserves a lot of respect for how he managed Palace’s attacking threat, especially when the game grew more stretched as Arsenal chased in the second half, but we all know his limitations when playing in that position. Around the hour mark, the Swiss midfielder was forced to take down Jordan Ayew after receiving a poor pass from Gabriel.

After receiving a booking for the incident, Xhaka went on to criticize his Brazilian teammate for exposing him with such a careless ball. It’s evident that the 29-year-old dislikes playing so far away from the pitch’s center, and who can blame him? After all, it’s not his job!

The early prognosis for Tierney’s injury is not positive, so he may need to grow used to playing in it. “He’s seeing a specialist tomorrow, and we’ll know more about the degree of the damage,” Arteta said of the Scot’s knee issue after the game. “The sense he had was not positive, and neither were the scans.” But we’ll have to see what occurs.”

While Arteta stated that the removal of Tavares was tactical, it appears that he has huge confidence difficulties with the Portuguese under-21 international. He’ll be hoping that Tomiyasu returns sooner rather than later so that he can switch Cedric to the left back role that he filled frequently and effectively last season. If that doesn’t happen soon, we may be in for a replay of the failed attempts to find alternate answers at full back that marred the end of the previous campaign.

Panic sets in when the top four race takes a devastating turn.

If you’re going to panic as an Arsenal supporter, this is perhaps the best time. The 3-0 loss to Crystal Palace not only represents three points lost, but with Tottenham’s 5-1 triumph over Newcastle this weekend, there has also been a seven-goal swing in the Champions League competition, with Spurs now sitting in fourth place.

It’s a dismal weekend for the Gunners, who went into the international break with a mood more comparable to the spring brightness that blanketed London this weekend, rather than the drab drizzle we got on Monday. Those looking ahead will have seen by now that Antonio Conte’s team has a much more favorable schedule than Arsenal. The North London Derby, which has finally been rescheduled for Thursday, May 12th, suddenly appears to be season defining, and the pressure is building.

However, Mikel Arteta was quick to point out after the game that this would not be an issue for his young team. “The pressure has been there for seven or eight weeks,” remarked the Spaniard. “We’ve been talking about the competition for the top four all the time, and these guys have been putting in really fantastic performances and gaining pretty good results.” We didn’t perform today, it’s as simple as that.”

“We still have a game in hand and we need to play,” he added when questioned about the Spurs particularly. “We know a lot will happen throughout the nine games. We have to play each other, we have some huge games coming up, and we have to concentrate on ourselves. The issue tonight was not Spurs, but rather what we did in the first half.”

While nerves may be running high in the Emirates Stadium, it’s critical that they don’t spill over onto the pitch. Arsenal must dismiss this game as a bad day at the office, and from the players’ perspective, it appears that they are eager to put this one behind them, as Martin Odegaard revealed after the game.

“We have to make sure it’s not [harmful],” the Norwegian explained. “It’s only one game, so we have to make sure we’re at the right level for the next one.” One terrible game can happen, but we have to make sure it’s the only one and strike back, which begins tomorrow at the practice field. We must look forward.

“Obviously, we’re all disappointed,” he added. “It was difficult for us to accept. We’ve been playing pretty well lately and have had a lot of close games. This one was difficult for us. We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again. It’s up to everyone to stick together, in my opinion. When we’re winning and doing well, it’s simple to stick together, so we’ll stick together and fight to win the next game.”

Next up is Brighton, who, although having one of the worst runs of form in the Premier League right now, appear to be the ideal match to get back on track. Arsenal had a horrible night on Monday, but if they want to play in the Champions League next season, they must not let it become anything more than that.