Premier League 2018/19: Arsenal vs Fulham

After their thrashing by Liverpool, Arsenal bounced back with a 4-1 win over Fulham. However, the win wasn’t as easy as the scoreline suggests. Most of the game was very tight until Arsenal’s third goal in the 79^th minute. In this tactical analysis, I’ll look at why this game was so tense.

Despite Arsenal being more dominant, this was because Fulham made a great account for themselves. Going to the Emirates they weren’t scared to attack Arsenal.

Fulham’s threats

This belief that they could attack Arsenal was evident for large stages of the match. This was even more evident when looking at their attacking trio of Ryan Sessegnon, Aleksandr Mitrovic and Andre Schurrle. In these three, Fulham were able to pose different challenges to the Arsenal defence.

The variety in their play made in incredibly hard for Arsenal to predict where or how they’d attack. Through this, Fulham created many goalscoring opportunities in the game. This was especially the case in the first half as Arsenal started the game with a three-man defence.

That set-up massively benefitted Sessegnon, because he was playing as an inside forward off the right. It therefore became even harder for the Arsenal defence to pick him up when he found spaces behind the wing backs and in between the three centre-backs.

Here’s an example of how Sessegnon was used on the right.

Here we saw how the elusiveness of Sessegnon created problems for Arsenal. Off the right, he was able to run in behind a defence who struggled to pick up any of Fulham’s front three.

The route to Mitrovic

However, they were able to change their approach depending on their desired target. Mitrovic has been their most dangerous player this season. They didn’t struggle to give him service, as he managed to put three headers on target. On another day, he could’ve scored.