Arsenal: 4 tactical reasons behind 2-0 Leicester win

4. Making Pressure Count

There is nothing especially tactical about this, but it’s something that plagued this team for near enough the entirety of last season: when they were on top they never made the moments count.

While these ‘spells’ never truly looked like being threatening as Arsenal couldn’t fashion a chance in a month of Sundays, the routine of having possession for the opening quarter, getting punished with the first opposition attack and then failing to create anything of note in a final flurry was a rinse and repeat occurrence.

What Arsenal are doing now is taking advantage of their dominance. The quick starts are becoming synonymous with this team but without the two goals scored in those opening 18 minutes the remaining 72 could easily have passed by with diminished confidence and less security.

Key in that is set pieces. Possession football, tiki taka this, and tiki taka that, is all well and good. It can look nice and it’s the signs of an intelligent team. But to have actual threat on dead balls is fundamental in the game: you can score when you’re playing poorly and add variance to your threat.

The game could and probably would have panned out entirely differently had the early goals not been taken. They built a foundation and shocked the home side before they’d even had chance to gather their thoughts.

Next up for Arsenal is broaden these periods of dominance, which they’re already showing positive signs of doing, and having someone like Smith Rowe fine-tuning his goal threat means when they do come around the chances of capitalising and punishing the opposition increases exponentially.

Making pressure count is a huge step forward for this team, especially away from home in tricky encounters.