If Mikel Arteta really loves Arsenal’s players, he should let them play

Gabriel Jesus’s injury and another unconvincing performance by Kai Havertz underlined how badly Arsenal need a new forward

Arsenal's Kai Havertz (right) reacts after missing a penalty in the shoot-out during Sunday's FA Cup defeat by Manchester United. Photograph: Mike Egerton/PA Wire RESTRICTIONS: EDITORIAL USE ONLY No use with unauthorised audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or "live" services. Online in-match use limited to 120 images, no video emulation. No use in betting, games or single club/league/player publications.

“Incredible how you don’t win that game.” Contemplating Arsenal’s elimination in the third round of the FA Cup against a Manchester United team that had played with 10 men for an hour, Mikel Arteta was professing disbelief. As though Arsenal’s defeat was a mystery nobody could explain.

Actually the explanation is pretty simple. Arsenal created a lot of chances but the two players on the end of most of them were Declan Rice and Kai Havertz. Rice is a midfielder who scores a goal every 10 games or so. Havertz is ... well, nobody is quite sure what he is, which is part of the problem, but Arteta has been using him as a false nine. Neither is a gifted finisher. If you are depending on these guys to put chances away, expect disappointment.

Havertz in particular had a nightmare game, missing three clear chances and then seeing Altay Bayindir save his weak penalty to lose Arsenal the shoot-out. Somehow he had managed to outdo even the stunning miss he contrived in the defeat to Newcastle, when he appeared to try to head the ball with his neck.

Havertz is not one of those players who laughs off their misses: when something goes wrong in a game, he develops a hunted look. Maybe that’s because he is so well acquainted with the unpleasant consequences that come with missing big chances. Soon after full-time he was getting trolled by the social media account of a company that makes bad pizzas, while his wife was posting examples of the abuse and threats she had been sent by morons online.

He deserves sympathy. It’s not his fault that he has been put in a situation he is not equipped to handle. It was Arteta who bet big that Havertz could be a Roberto Firmino-type at the centre of Arsenal’s attack. This looks like a losing bet. The question now is how much more the manager is willing to risk in the effort to prove he was right.

“I said to [Havertz] and to all of them that I love them, that we all love them individually and as a team,” Arteta revealed afterwards. Presumably intending to reassure, the coach had instead conjured a desperately unhappy image of dejected Arsenal players sitting around listening to a grim-faced Arteta insisting that he loved them.

If he really does love these players then maybe he should back off a little bit and let them play football. In Arsène Wenger’s favoured phrase, Arsenal are playing with the handbrake on. This is most evident in the approach to set pieces.

In the 25th minute Arsenal won a corner. They took two minutes and 26 seconds to take it. That extraordinary delay was only partly explained by David Raya needing to replace a contact lens. The referee held up play because he was unhappy with the levels of jostling, but that is all part of Arsenal’s set-piece strategy. In the 41st minute they won another corner. They took a minute and 15 seconds to take it.

Mikel Arteta's approach to Arsenal matches has not been hands-off enough. Photograph: Mike Egerton/PA Wire

The thinking behind these delays appears to be that the more time you can take over a corner, the more chance that one of your opponents might be lulled to sleep. In itself this is probably true, and Arsenal’s formidable record of scoring from set pieces shows that they know what they are doing.

But maybe they need to consider the impact such tricks have in the wider context of the game. When you regularly waste more than a minute pretending to take a corner, the opposition players aren’t the only ones at risk of falling asleep. What about your fans? What about your own players, who might want to get on with the game but instead must patiently wait to carry out their appointed roles in Nicolas Jover’s latest intricate scheme?

Arsenal’s “cleverness” broke up the flow of the game, which is normally what you do when you are an away team clinging to a result and trying to run down the clock. Nobody wants to watch this and it is hard to believe the players enjoy playing it either. The most memorable thing about that first half was the sheer deadness of the atmosphere in the stadium in the minutes before half-time.

This was not in the grand tradition of the Arsenal-United rivalry, of which we had all been thoroughly reminded in the nostalgia-soaked build-up. The second half was much better, enhanced by the absence of VAR, which would have cancelled the game’s most dramatic events.

Manchester United's Altay Bayindir saves a penalty from Arsenal's Martin Odegaard during normal time of Sunday's FA Cup clash. Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images

With all that nostalgia so fresh in the mind, it was hard not to notice after Bayindir saved Odegaard’s penalty that the match had so far followed the same pattern as that 1999 semi-final classic: United taking the lead and Arsenal equalising, a United player sent off and Arsenal missing a penalty.

The resemblance was superficial. The numbers back up the impression that today’s football is much more controlled than the football of 25 years ago. Red cards seem to affect the game more now. Sunday’s match was far more one-sided than the 1999 game, with Arsenal having 70 per cent of possession compared with 56 per cent in 1999. Part of that is that today’s teams take more care in possession: Arsenal completed 88 per cent of their passes on Sunday compared with 73 per cent in 1999. And teams used to put a lot more energy into trying to win the ball: the 1999 semi had 91 attempted tackles, compared with 57 on Sunday. It also seems a pretty safe bet that nobody in 1999 was spending more than two minutes preparing to take a corner kick.

The main difference was that, in 1999, these clubs both had better players. Instead of Ryan Giggs coming off the bench, United had Joshua Zirkzee. There would be no late flash of genius to light up this game, though Zirkzee did at least score the decisive penalty in the shoot-out.

For Arsenal it was a second cup defeat in four days that underlined the need to sign a forward – a need that has intensified now that Gabriel Jesus has joined Bukayo Saka and Ethan Nwaneri on the injury list. They can’t afford a superstar such as Alexander Isak, but neither can they afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Leandro Trossard was nobody’s idea of the perfect signing when he arrived from Brighton in January 2023, but he turned out to be quite useful. Even another short-term solution is better than doing nothing