Gunners “roughed-up” by Manchester United in NYC

Over 82,000 packed MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands outside of New York City to watch Saturday’s preseason match between Arsenal and Manchester City. Red Devils 2, Arsenal nil.

From the start it was apparent what Erik ten Hag’s approach would be to “out-physical” the Gunners, and it worked.

At the end of the day Arsenal was out played, out hustled and the Red Devils took advantage of a referee who probably let the game become a little too chippy. However, if Mikel Arteta’s squad expects to be successful this season on many front they will have to adapt to such play from opponents. Bukayo Saka was the target of many of those physical altercations during the match. Other clubs will see this tactic v Arsenal and will surely pull out the same game plan throughout the coming season.

As for the three new boys who started their first match together, Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and Jurrien Timber, only Timber can feel good about Saturday’s performance. Of course, let’s remember this was only a preseason match, and that this was the first time the three had been integrated into the starting XI, so we need to look at it from a 30,000 foot perspective and not jump to any conclusions. There’s a lot of training time and three more preseason matches left before the season opener in three weeks.

Mikel Arteta expressed his feelings following the defeat on Saturday, “Having a tough match of this level in this context gives you a lot of information, and that’s always very positive. That information is obviously there are a lot of things we have to improve. How important the boxes are, that errors are part of football, you have to overcome them as well. And how painful it is to lose a game. Physically it’s been super, super demanding. Overall they had their moments when they were so efficient. We had ours, when we had more dominance and we certainly tried again in the second half, but the chances we had, we didn’t convert them, and they won the game. When they play 55 times together they will be better. It will flow better, they will understand each other better and will be more dominant and better. But it takes time to glide and we have to respect that. But I saw a lot of positive things, and things I like much more than the game we won the other day against the MLS even though the result is very different.”

Now, it’s on to Los Angeles to face Barcelona on Wednesday night in Stan Kroenke’s SoFi Stadium.

COYG!

Gunner1953