Arsenal Vs West Ham United: Defence, defence, defence

Arsenal beat West Ham United 3-1 on Saturday afternoon to record their first Premier League win of the season. But while the result was positive, the performance was less so, especially when it comes to that dastardly defending.

I will hearken on about this point throughout this season: The first year under Unai Emery is not really about the results, it is all about the improvement and the development of the process. And so, after Saturday afternoon’s 3-1 win over West Ham United, I was drawn to one rather critical aspect of Arsenal’s performance, the defence.

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While this was a good result, the performance did not match it. It should be said that Arsenal did improve greatly in the second half and played with far more control in the midfield, but defensively, there were some majorly concerning signs throughout the 90 minutes.

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West Ham had 13 shots in total. That is too many. Period. When you consider that they only had 30% of the possession, then that number becomes even more alarming. Five of those shots were on target with Petr Cech having to make a number of excellent saves to repel the Hammers, including a Robert Snodgrass one-on-one that absolutely should have been converted.

That is far too many for a team that was primarily playing on the counter-attack. The odd shot, inevitably, will slip through. The opposition are trying to score, after all. But the quantity and quality of the chances that Arsenal conceded were extremely worrying.

To his credit, in his interview after the match, Unai Emery conceded that his side struggled from turnovers:

"“We suffered with the transition in the first half, but we improved in the second half and controlled it more like we want. We need to improve in this transition to get the balance.”"

Certainly, Arsenal were far too open and exposed when they lost the ball. The speed of West Ham in the final third caused them problems, but it was the advanced positions of the midfield and the full backs that accentuated those issues. Neither Hector Bellerin nor Nacho Monreal provided any semblance of security in wide positions, Granit Xhaka and Matteo Guendouzi weren’t cohesive in their pressing, and Shkodran Mustafi and Sokratis were consistently pulled out of position as a result.

This is not as much an individual shortcoming as it is a collective one. As I have said, defending is not like attacking. Individual brilliance means very little. It is far better to be a connected unit that works best in unison with one another. At this point, this team is the very opposite of that.

It is still very early days and it’s far too early to properly judge Emery’s work on the training ground just yet. But this was unquestionably his biggest task arriving at the Emirates. Nothing that I have seen in these first three games has changed that. There is much work to be done.