Arsenal left Villa Park with all three points after a tight 1-0 win over Aston Villa on Monday night, a result that stretched their unbeaten start to the 2026\/27 season. The game grew increasingly heated late on, particularly after Ezri Konsa, formerly of Aston Villa, appeared in Arsenal colours.<\/p>\n
The decisive moment arrived just before the hour mark, when Bukayo Saka finished a flowing move that had begun with Eberechi Eze and passed through Martin \u00d8degaard and Riccardo Calafiori. It was a neat attacking sequence in an otherwise difficult contest for Arsenal, who had to work far harder than in their previous two victories.<\/p>\n
Mikel Arteta also reached a personal milestone, taking charge of his 250th Premier League match, while using the occasion to assess new additions Konsa and Bruno Guimar\u00e3es. Both made their league debuts on the night, and the pair cost Arsenal a combined $170 million (\u00a3125 million).<\/p>\n
Villa made sure Arsenal could not dominate early in the manner they had against Manchester City in the FA Community Shield and Coventry City in the league opener. Possession was 61% to 39% in Arsenal\u2019s favour, but the visitors managed only seven shots, with two on target. Villa, meanwhile, restricted Arsenal centrally and forced them towards the wings, where they found little space to hurt the home side.<\/p>\n
Arsenal also struggled to turn set pieces into a weapon. Declan Rice\u2019s corner delivery was underwhelming, and several free kicks and corners came to nothing. Their breakthrough was helped by a denied penalty for Saka moments earlier, before Calafiori and Saka combined to finally end the deadlock.<\/p>\n
Among the individual displays, Calafiori stood out with his assist, while Saka delivered the match-winning finish. David Raya had a quiet evening, Gabriel remained composed, and Bruno Guimar\u00e3es made a notable debut late on with a strong challenge in stoppage time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arsenal needed a late spark from Saka to beat Aston Villa and keep their unbeaten start in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18885,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,1381,711],"tags":[1836,59,1981],"class_list":["post-18886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-arsenal-match-reports","category-aston-villa","tag-2026-27-premier-league","tag-featured","tag-gameweek-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18886","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=18886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}