Arsenal suffer same old problems as Sam Clucas strikes twice to hand Swansea victory
Swansea City 3 Arsenal 1: The Englishman equalised for the hosts after Nacho Monreal's opener before sealing victory in the final 10 minutes of the match
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Your support makes all the difference.The problem for Arsenal is that this sort of result and performance long ago ceased to be a surprise. Theoretically, a defeat to the side who started the day at the bottom of the Premier League should be a cause for alarm, the sort of thing to jolt those at the club into making changes.
But this 3-1 defeat to an excellent, much-improved Swansea side was entirely predictable. Signing Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is all very well, but when a team has the structural and leadership problems that Arsenal do, nothing will change.
What’s perhaps worse is they went ahead in this one, Nacho Monreal giving them the lead before the inevitable spinelessness set in. Sam Clucas got two and Jordan Ayew was gifted another, as Swansea clambered off the foot of the league.
Swansea should have taken the lead on a number of occasions in the opening ten minutes, once when a Jordan Ayew shot deflected and looped just wide, then shortly afterwards Laurent Koscielny had to slide in with a brilliant block to stop Alfie Mawson scoring.
The home fans howled for a penalty when Clucas, clean through on goal, was tackled by Mohamed Elneny, but referee Lee Mason correctly spotted that to everyone’s surprise Elneny had taken the ball cleanly.
Arsenal broadly laboured and Alex Iwobi, a curious player who doesn’t seem to perform any kind of outstanding role other than the odd nice one-two, summed things up after smartly taking the ball to the byline before cutting back to a vacant spot around 30 yards from goal. Numerous adjectives sprung to mind, but the most apposite was probably ‘bloodless.’
They couldn’t even take the lead with any conviction. Less than a minute after Monreal had slid emphatically home from a delicious Mesut Ozil pass, their defence parted accommodatingly for Clucas to steam through and whack in an equaliser.
For the first 15 minutes of the second-half Arsenal basically camped around 30 yards from the Swansea goal, keeping the ball jealously. So much so, it looked like they viewed taking a shot as less an attempt to score a goal, more a risk of giving the thing away.
Mkhitaryan, rather unsportingly left out of the starting XI by Arsene Wenger, arrived after an hour: the Arsenal fans greeted the introduction with relieved cheers, the home support chose that moment to suggest Alexis Sanchez “left ‘cos you’re sh*t.”
Then, with perfect comic timing, Arsenal instantly attempted to prove them right. Hours of rain had made the pitch soggy in the extreme, just the right side of treacherous, which may end up being Petr Cech’s excuse for the calamitous miss-kick that fell straight into Ayew’s path. He tapped home, and in a hotel somewhere in Hertfordshire, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang checked return flights to Germany.
Nathan Dyer should have made it 3-1 a few minutes later, shooting against a post after the Arsenal defence had meekly melted away. On the touchline Wenger flapped his arms in that familiar manner, for all the world looking like a man who has no idea how to stop or change this.
Giroud, seemingly on his way to Chelsea, was afforded a curtain call after coming on with 15 minutes to spare. But he couldn’t take it, and nobody was surprised when Ayew strolled in from the right, squared to Clucas who thumped in his second.
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