He’s not everyone’s cup of tea but Kai Havertz was something special against Liverpool.
Of course had Gabriel Jesus not be unable to play Havertz might not have got a game, but he did, and he was sensational. And that shouldn’t be forgotten.
He moves around a lot, he presses forward, and he is big, and he really doesn’t mind if he bumps into someone or someone bumps into him. And I think he really was a major contributor on Sunday to a win that just felt utterly important to the club.
Of course it doesn’t mean we are going to win the league – a look at the table confirms that. But the league table does show that we are up there with the other two likely clubs.
| Club | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
| 1 | Liverpool | 23 | 15 | 6 | 2 | 52 | 22 | 30 | 51 |
| 2 | Manchester City | 22 | 15 | 4 | 3 | 54 | 25 | 29 | 49 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 23 | 15 | 4 | 4 | 47 | 22 | 25 | 49 |
| 4 | Aston Villa | 23 | 14 | 4 | 5 | 49 | 30 | 19 | 46 |
| 5 | Tottenham Hotspur | 23 | 13 | 5 | 5 | 49 | 35 | 14 | 44 |
Yes we are four goals behind Manchester City and two points behind Liverpool, and Manchester City have a game in hand, but that is still better than the pundits were predicting.
And we do have the best defence in the league, which means when there is the cash to buy another player we can focus on attack. Although… I am not too sure that might be necessary.
We are seven goals behind Manchester City, and when they play their spare game that could be ten goals. But, by the look of things Martinelli is back in the goal scoring mood, which he clearly lost earlier in the season.
And when Martinelli is a real threat that means so are Jesus, Odegaard and Saka.
Last season’s goalscoring was undoubtedly helped by the fact that we had all four of those players on the pitch a lot of the time, and they just kept on scoring goals. All four in fact got into double figures, not just because they are excellent at scoring goals, but because defences became distracted – all the while when they were looking at one or two those four, the others were finding space to score.
This season we have seven players who have each scored four or more in the league – and I know four doesn’t sound like many, but with all of them being potential goal scorers that does mean the defences tend once more to be stretched, wondering who to mark.
So while some pundits like the utterly miserable Carragher and Neville are telling our players to get off the pitch at the end of the game rather than share their joy and pleasure with the fans, Arsenal are focussing on quite a different approach from anything they have noticed. In short half a team who can score.
Arsenal need to make up the goals that they are behind the other members of the top five at the moment, and my thought is, we’ve scored ten in the last three games. The previous ten goals took us nine games. That’s a fairly nifty improvement.
So that’s the key. Let’s catch up on the number of goals being scored as well as winning the matches. The defence is doing its job and we are two points and five goals behind Liverpool.
That shouldn’t be too difficult to make up.
Tony Attwood 7/2/24