Arsenal Vs Chelsea: Laurent Koscielny and smart defending

Arsenal kept just their fourth clean sheet of the season in Saturday’s 2-0 win over Chelsea. In large part, it was down to Laurent Koscielny and intelligent defending.

Throughout most of this season, Arsenal have not been known for their intelligent, composed, aware defending. While a large reason for forcing Arsene Wenger to resign last season was because of the consistent and extended defensive vulnerabilities of the team, change had not really been implemented in the Frenchman’s wake.

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Prior to this weekend, the Gunners were on pace to concede 55 goals. Last year, they conceded 51 goals. Wenger’s successor, Unai Emery, even with better personnel after extensive summer spending at centre-back, goalkeeper and defensive midfield, has not been able to fix the defence.

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But on Saturday evening, when Arsenal hosted Chelsea in what was essentially a must-win game to keep their top-four hopes alive, it was the defence that they relied upon. And it was their captain who led the way with a stirring display.

Even if you ignore Laurent Koscielny’s goal that sealed the 2-0 victory and simply focus on what he did at the other end of the pitch, you would still come away from watching this game with one player head and shoulders above the rest. He was immense, in every sense of the word.

What typified Koscielny’s performance, and that of his many of his teammates, was his intelligence, awareness, sense of danger and positioning. In his younger years, the athleticism, speed, and ability to recover was often what jumped out when watching him play, as well as an erring of rashness and over-eagerness that could thrust him into hot water. But this was a very different kind of display.

He was tight to Eden Hazard, for instance, but never turned; he challenged former teammate Olivier Giroud but was never rolled; he marshalled from deep, rather than manhandling the opposition. He was calm, aware, and organised, helped by the equally experienced Sokratis alongside him, who played with the same combination of aggression and understanding.

Koscielny’s individual display was emblematic of the collective. In the first half, Arsenal had the energy and intensity to press high up the pitch. They hounded and harassed Chelsea from the very first minute — the opening stanzas of the game, in fact, were a perfect foreshadowing of the first half. They pressured the Chelsea defenders into mistakes in possession and suffocated the service into a smaller front three.

And then, in the second half, with a two-goal lead to defend and tired legs evident in midfield, they sat a little deeper, purposefully chose to prioritise positional discipline and organisation, and simply held Chelsea at arm’s length. Bernd Leno had just one save to make. It came in the 81st minute.

Odd as it may sound, Arsenal won this game because of their smart defending, both in their collective pressure in the first half and their unified discipline and structure in the second. And at the heart of it all was Laurent Koscielny.