Chelsea vs Arsenal: 3 vital player partnerships

Martin Odegaard & Bukayo Saka

A lot has been missing from recent performances: cutting edge, intensity, and speed of thought, just to name a few. But there is more.

Building up to the international break both Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka were unstoppable. It is no exaggeration to say the pair were operating at a world class level, even if they hadn’t come up against supposed ‘big’ sides during that run.

In the defeat to Crystal Palace their blossoming relationship was absent largely because Odegaard had one of his post-international stinkers; against Brighton it wasn’t there as Arteta fiddled with his system too much and had the Norwegian deep; and in the 1-0 defeat to the Saints it was tactical and performance based.

Starting out on the left on that occasion, presumably with an eye on having Saka protect Nuno, hope is that it won’t happen again. When Saka and Odegaard can combine, with the stand-in captain finding those pockets of room in the half-spaces where he can feed Saka through the full-back and the centre-back, it became one of the hallmarks of the improvement in performances and results.

When those two are on-song they are truly joyous to watch.

Arsenal aren’t expected to be dominating Chelsea for territory so the spells of possession in their third will be limited. In such cases you need to maximise your assets which means, in the most simplest terms possible, getting your best players closer together.

Because, boiled down, that is precisely what it is.