Arsenal suffered a 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth on Saturday, a result that handed a blunt reminder of the vulnerabilities still undermining their title bid. Junior Kroupi opened the scoring early, Viktor Gy\u00f6keres levelled from the penalty spot, but Alex Scott restored Bournemouth’s advantage in the 74th minute from a cheap Arsenal turnover.<\/p>\n
Despite edging possession and expected goals, Arsenal struggled to fashion clear openings from open play. The side regularly moved the ball out of their defensive third under pressure only to be stifled in the final third. The report noted that the five players with the highest open-play expected assists this season were either injured or began the game on the bench, a factor that shaped the lack of creativity.<\/p>\n
Arteta made wholesale changes just after the hour, removing the attacking three behind Gy\u00f6keres after Gabriel Martinelli, Kai Havertz and Noni Madueke produced no shots from open play. The crowd\u2019s impatience, born of recent near-misses and cup exits, became audible and the stadium atmosphere appeared to influence player decisions on the ball.<\/p>\n
Raya could not do much about either close-range Bournemouth strike and Gabriel\u2019s misplaced long ball contributed to the second goal, which David Brooks and Scott finished. The manager\u2019s post-match reference to crowd influence was unchanged in tone from a previous comment: \u201cWe noticed immediately the moment the crowd got more relaxed, more positive, the atmosphere changed and the players started to make better decisions and we managed to win the game,\u201d the Arsenal boss mused after a stodgy 2\u20130 win over Everton last month.<\/p>\n
Player ratings reflected a mixed display: David Raya 6.0; Ben White 7.0; William Saliba 6.6; Gabriel 6.3; Myles Lewis-Skelly 6.7; Mart\u00edn Zubimendi 6.1; Declan Rice 6.9; Kai Havertz 6.0; Noni Madueke 6.1; Viktor Gy\u00f6keres 7.0; Gabriel Martinelli 5.8. Notable substitutes included Eberechi Eze 7.0 and Max Dowman 5.9.<\/p>\n
Key match statistics underlined the gap between chance creation and finishing: possession 53% to 47%, xG 2.41 to 1.20, total shots 15 to 8 and shots on target 3 each.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arsenal lose 2-1 at home to Bournemouth; Gy\u00f6keres penalty canceled by Alex Scott’s 74th-minute strike<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11469,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,1381,739],"tags":[1162,1359,1305],"class_list":["post-11470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-arsenal-match-reports","category-bournemouth","tag-analytics","tag-arsenal-injury","tag-bench-selection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}