Arsenal: Unai Emery just can’t solve the most crucial equation

Arsenal kept their first clean sheet away from home, but that doesn’t tell you enough. What you need to know is that Unai Emery is still grasping at straws.

If you were to simply look at the scoreline and see that Arsenal traveled to Watford and won 1-0, you may think that Unai Emery had figured out the road woes. Our first clean sheet and it came against Watford? Hot damn!

Nah. That’s not the case. Were it not for a fortuitous ankle in the 10th minute and a bull-headed Troy Deeney in the 11th minute, this match would have went differently. Even playing a man down, Watford were the best team out there and were hard done to not get a goal of their own.

It’s immensely frustrating, as Arsenal fans, to continuously see our team look so unstoppable at home, yet neutered away from home. And it was extra clear, against Watford, that Unai Emery is just as frustrated by the lack of answers.

You can gather that from how many things Emery tried all in the span of 90 minutes. He started in a 4-2-3-1 that, for the life of me, looked really strong. I was thrilled to see Konstantinos Mavropanos, Shkodran Mustafi was needed for the aerial issues and Granit Xhaka and Lucas Torreira were back out there together behind Aaron Ramsey.

It was the right lineup.

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But at half, Mesut Ozil came on for Torreira to play a more advanced position and push Ramsey back, which completely changed the makeup of the club, but did very little to change the makeup of the game.

Then, at the 58th minute, Mavropanos came off as Emery reverted to a back three, letting Mustafi slide in on the ride next to Laurent Koscielny and Nacho Monreal. This left Henrikh Mkhitaryan to play right wingback and Alex Iwobi to play left wingback.

It didn’t work, so nine minutes later, he sent on Ainsley Maitland-Niles, though not to take off Mkhitaryan, but to see off Aaron Ramsey, which in and of itself made no sense, but even still, the formation shifted again, this time into a 4-3-3.

There was nothing cohesive about any part of this match. Unai Emery was throwing darts in the dark, hoping to hit something hard enough to make it stick. But even in spite of the 1-0 win, nothing did. We were lucky.

I won’t moan about the result and, honestly, I won’t moan about Emery’s decision-making either. He is trying so hard to get his guys into good away form by making huge switches in the middle of matches but nothing is working. The least he can do is keep trying, which is exactly what he’s doing.