Sunday\u2019s London derby at the Emirates left two clear headlines: Arsenal\u2019s set-piece supremacy and Chelsea\u2019s recurring disciplinary and dead-ball troubles. For lengthy periods the visitors produced the more encouraging football, yet the margins of the match were defined by corners and a dismissal.<\/p>\n
William Saliba\u2019s opener arrived from a corner, the ninth time this season Arsenal have taken a 1\u20130 lead from a corner. Jurri\u00ebn Timber\u2019s second made the scoreline safe and took the club to 16 corner goals in a Premier League season, equalling the all-time record. \u201cLook at the quality on the pitch\u2014immense, but set pieces are still the ones that made the difference,\u201d Arsenal\u2019s manager admitted. \u201cThey are so good at that, and we are so good at that as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arsenal have now scored 19 Premier League goals from set plays this term, the most in the division, and 37% of their non-penalty goals have come from dead balls. The leaders averaged 1.1 open-play xG per game, only the fifth-best attack in the league, while Manchester City are generating 1.4 xG per game. Chelsea limited Arsenal to just 0.59 open-play xG.<\/p>\n
For Chelsea, the defeat compounded long-standing problems. Pedro Neto\u2019s red card was the club\u2019s ninth of the season, and nine different players have been dismissed, a stat Rosenior summed up as: \u201cIt\u2019s the same story.\u201d He was \u201cbitterly disappointed\u201d by the result and added: \u201cThat\u2019s something I felt we had addressed,\u201d Rosenior sighed, \u201cwe went 10 games without a red card, now two in two games and that\u2019s a problem we need to solve and the set-play issue is something we need to keep working on.\u201d He also insisted: \u201cI thought the set-up tactically was good,\u201d Rosenior insisted with plenty of justification after the 2\u20131 reserve. \u201cArsenal didn\u2019t cause any problems until set plays.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenior also defended earlier requests of his goalkeeper: \u201cI\u2019m asking Rob to do things that he hasn\u2019t done before,\u201d the English coach insisted. \u201cWhen my players make mistakes, I\u2019m accountable. That\u2019s on me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result exposed both a repeatable strength for Arsenal and persistent vulnerabilities for Chelsea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arsenal’s corner proficiency settled the derby; Chelsea’s red cards and set-play woes endure always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7189,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,190,969],"tags":[1162,944,1089],"class_list":["post-7190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-chelsea","category-premier-league","tag-analytics","tag-andrey-santos","tag-chelsea-struggles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7190","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=7190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}