Premier League 2018/19: Arsenal vs Wolves

This post originally featured on our comprehensive Wolverhampton Wanderers analysis sister site, wolvesanalysis.com.

“You find out lifes this game of inches, so is football”  Tony D’Amato in the 1999 film Any Given Sunday. While it may be about American Football, never have words rang so true after the game against Arsenal. It feels weird saying this, but it’s true  we deserved to win at the Emirates. Wolves deserved to beat Arsenal. How crazy is that? Morgan Gibbs-White hit the underside of the crossbar deep into stoppage time before the ball bounced the wrong side of the goal line. Inches were the difference. If you look at the stats in insolation from the game, you will see that Arsenal had over 70% of the ball and nine more corners. It’s only when you start to dig a little deeper that you begin to see what should have been.

Did we have our backs against the wall for large parts of the game? Of course. Did we have the better chances? You bet we did. Only some strong goalkeeping from Bernd Leno and some abject finishing on our part prevented us from leaving North London with all three points. The other side of the coin is that Patricio made a couple of saves as well, while Arsenal also squandered some glit-edged opportunities. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. In this analysis, I am going to go through the big moments in the game and they aren’t what you may think. For example, one of them has to do with a substitution that was made. Read on, to find out…

Team News

There were no real surprises when it came to both sides starting XIs; Iwobi got the nod over Mkhitaryan, that aside Emery went with the same side that got the late point against Liverpool last time out in the Premier League. Nuno stuck to his guns, with Jota and Saiss coming in for Bonatini and Hause on the bench the only minor changes.

Resilient is a word I would use to define our defensive performance as it was an onslaught at times from Emery’s guys and nothing really illustrates this better than the average positions of the respective sides. The fact that Arsenal had 80% of their outfield players in our half should give you some idea.

There are a few minor observations from the above which jump out. More so than usual, Coady (#16) is much closer to Ryan Bennett (#5) than he is to Willy Boly (#15) and while this can be attributed to the sheer volume of Arsenal players on Wolves’ defensive right-side, it still leaves a slight gap. To give you some idea as to how well we defended, their number ten is Mesut Ozil and despite WhoScored telling me that he made 83 passes, I seldom remember him on the ball. Yes, that could have something to do with Ozil disappearing as he tends to do on occasion, but let’s give us some kudos for that.

xG On Our Side In the First Half

We went into halftime with a one-goal lead that we were good value for. Excluding any shots that were 0.01 or under on the xG scale, the xG score was 0.98-0.65 in the opening period in our favour. Whilst we may have been performing ever so slightly above the model, should we have maybe gone into the break with a two-goal lead? We shall now analyse the two best chances (including the goal) for both sides in the first half, starting with Wolves.