Arsenal make it five wins in a row with victory over Everton, but Unai Emery’s Gunners remain an enigma
Unai Emery isn’t the easiest Premier League manager to understand and his Arsenal team are also likely to prompt outbreaks of head-scratching.
To give the Spaniard his due, Emery’s English is vastly improved since his arrival in May and he now seems able to express himself with clarity and fluency.
His team, on the other hand, remain something of an enigma, despite today's 2-0 win over Everton extending the Gunners’ winning run to five matches in all competitions.
Read more: Five things we learned from the Premier League weekend
Arsenal have racked up the wins since kicking off the season with back-to-back defeats against Manchester City and Chelsea, seeing off West Ham, Cardiff, Newcastle, Vorskla and now the Toffees.
Yet they still look nowhere near the finished article; a dysfunctional collection of players not quite sure of what they’re doing or if it is actually going to work if they do.
Their most gifted individuals – Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – remain under-utilised, while the team seems unable to exercise control, rendering games a chaotic lottery.
Against Everton, Arsenal owed much to the superior finishing of Alexandre Lacazette and a plain wrong offside call that allowed Aubameyang to score the second goal.
Lacazette’s 56th-minute strike – a howitzer into the top-right corner of Jordan Pickford’s goal – was exactly the sort of virtuoso brilliance the hosts needed to open the scoring, and which Everton lacked.
Aubameyang’s effort just three minutes later knocked the wind out of the visitors but should have been disallowed given that he was a yard offside when Aaron Ramsey mis-controlled the ball into his path.
Lacazette fired Arsenal in front with a powerful rising shot (Source: Getty)
The Gunners were also indebted to goalkeeper Petr Cech, who enjoyed his first clean sheet of the season.
Cech – harshly mocked for some iffy close control and passing in earlier games – proved adept enough with his feet when slide-tacking Dominic Calvert-Lewin as he bore down on goal in the second minute.
The stopper pulled off a similar trick to thwart former team-mate Theo Walcott shortly before half-time and generally kept Emery’s side in the contest during the first period.
Cech saved from Calvert-Lewin and Walcott with his feet (Source: Getty)
Arsenal fans seeking signs of progress can draw encouragement from the performance of Lucas Torreira, however, who was making a belated first league start since a £25m summer transfer from Sampdoria.
The diligent and combative Uruguay midfielder was a reassuring presence alongside Granit Xhaka, whose deep-lying position belies his defensive deficiencies.
Torreira was also purposeful on the ball, and it was his interception 30 yards from goal as Everton attempted to clear their lines that allowed Ramsey to find Lacazette for his goal.
Midfielder Torreira impressed on his first league start (Source: Getty)
The legacy of Patrick Vieira is that every defensive midfielder at Arsenal is measured against the Invincibles captain and the position has taken on a kind of mythical status.
Of his successors, Gilberto Silva was a fine player and Mathieu Flamini showed promise, but the role has largely been neglected or mis-cast – with Xhaka, who looks as though he would much rather be attacking, a case in point.
The scurrying Torreira has already impressed, though, and Emery’s Gunners have tended to look a more robust and coherent unit with him on the pitch. When they burst forward on the counter in the 93rd minute, it was the 22-year-old leading the charge.
Perhaps Torreira will help knit together Emery’s disparate team, free up Ozil and Aubameyang to contribute more, and provide greater reassurance to what is still a jittery defence.
Then again, it may require the manager to reconsider the 4-2-3-1 system he seems so wedded to in order to deploy his most effective players in more influential areas of the pitch.
He is unlikely to change it now, with fixtures against Watford, Fulham, Leicester and Crystal Palace up next in the league, but will want to get it right by the following match, the visit of Liverpool on 3 November.