Arsenal Vs Huddersfield Town: Yes, that was rubbish

Arsenal may have beaten Huddersfield Town on Saturday afternoon, but they were rubbish in doing so. And the stats prove it. Unai Emery has a lot of work to do.

Arsenal won what Unai Emery described as a ‘must-win’ game. Their trip to Huddersfield Town was fraught with danger. Expectation was high, playing against bottom of the table, the Gunners’ away form has been very poor for much of the season, there was much that could go wrong. So, surely, with a 2-1 victory, all is happy and rosy, right?

Find the latest episode of the Pain in the Arsenal Podcast here — Huddersfield, abuse and a difficult question

Well, no. Arsenal may have won the match, but they did not play very well. In fact, they were completely and utterly rubbish.

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Here are some very simple statistics from Saturday’s 2-1 win that paint a broad picture of the pattern of the match: Huddersfield had 55% possession. They had 15 shots to Arsenal’s nine; six shots on target to four and had five corners while Emery’s side had zero. Now, I don’t mean to completely negative about a victory, but Huddersfield were the better team, and it wasn’t all that close.

This is the Huddersfield that had, prior to the weekend, not scored 597 minutes of action, had amassed just 11 points all season, 13 from safety, and had a devastatingly poor goal difference of -33. They had not won in 13 matches, losing 12 of them. This is a truly terrible Premier League team. And they were comfortably the better unit here. They controlled the middle of the park, they outpassed the Gunners by 86, put in 20 more crosses and could have snatched a point with a different bounce of the ball in the second half.

I will praise Emery and his players for being able to win a match that they did not deserve to win, for grinding out a result on the road — this was, after all, the type of thing that Arsene Wenger’s teams could not do and was ultimately a key reason why the club has fallen out of the Premier League’s elite.

But a part of this first season under Emery’s tutelage was also to make progress, to install a clear way of playing, to improve as a collective group of players. And that, at present, is seemingly not happening, and not just because of Saturday. Arsenal have been playing poorly for some time now. I count just two good performances since Christmas.

In that light, Emery is not exempt from criticism. He is the man who should be building this team and harnessing the quality that is there, laying down the foundations for future years. But as Huddersfield helps to prove, that is not seemingly happening.

I am not calling for Emery’s head. I am not arguing that he is a bad manager. I am simply stating that some of the recent performances have been concerning, most of all Saturday, even if his team did get the victory in the end.