AWAY DAYS: INTER MILAN

Well hello there Le Grove readers. This is a special guest post from Filipp, theredcannon.com. He has a big passion for Arsenal, writes blogs, and he was in Italy. So here’s his match report.

I have been an Arsenal fan for over two decades, yet I've only had the opportunity to see them play live a handful of times. The first attempt was a Champions League game in Munich. I secured a ticket through one of the popular reseller platforms, sat on a warm seat, and watched Bayern score an early goal, Arsenal equalise in the 11th minute and then... everybody knows what was on the scoresheet after. That evening, I decided that resellers would never get extra 200 Euros worth of my tears over the ticket face value.

Obtaining an official ticket for a non-regular fan has been challenging lately, in addition to the usual UK visa pain. The next best thing is the away Champions League games and this year I got lucky. Milan residents were quite angry with the ticket prices for the CL group stage. It's been estimated around 5-10 thousand empty seats at the Milan - Liverpool game and when Inter opened tickets for the general public there were plenty of free seats. Luckily Milan is only a couple of hours away from my home, which meant a match made in heaven (not that the missus was thrilled, but hey, that's marriage, it's all about compromise). They announced the full house yesterday and to be fair I didn't see too many empty seats around. 

Getting to the stadium

The infrastructure around such a legendary stadium as San Siro disappointed me a bit. With entrances to an entire stand closed off, the remaining gates were absolutely rammed. Apart from that, the chaotic queue was caused by a large number of people exiting the underground station and funnelling through a single gate. We had to walk around three quarters of a stadium to finally get to the stadium - all in all it took almost 30 minutes from the underground exit to the stadium seat, which I think is quite too much. The corridors in the sector are also not user friendly, there's one toilet you get access to and the path to it blocked by a hefty queue to the food stand. I have been to football games in four different countries and this stadium’s infrastructure is far from optimal.One of the reasons I was a bit frustrated by this experience is that I really love to see the warm-up session. 

My ticket was on the front row of a sector, which was supposed to mean a pretty decent view. How surprised I was when this was the actual warm-up visible from my seat. 

“Welcome to Italy!” - said one of my neighbours. Luckily they all went back to their seats when the match started and didn't even allow me to get closer to the fence for a nice picture - quite a respectable football culture!

Arsenal warm-up routine

The warmup from the Arsenal players was a bit inert. Practised shots were not really good, nobody was hitting corners. I don't know if it's overconfidence or lack of concentration. The best shooter from our side was Martinelli, which means finishing issues are mostly in his head. It was so comforting to see Odegaard warming up on the pitch with others though. Out of 3-4 attempts for each attacking player, only Saka once managed to curve an unstoppable ball for a goalkeeper. And then as a very last action when the starting players began to leave the pitch, the captain himself came to the shooting spot and rolled it into the bottom corner with the ease of a Ballon d'Or nominee. One last interesting detail - while around 20 players were warming up, Sterling didn't even take his "Wenger-style puffy coat" off.

It was also quite unusual to see Arsenal warm-up in the second half. It wasn't what I'm used to from past football experiences, even including how Inter did it today. Our coaching staff didn't send one big group to warm-up to subsequently select substitutes from it. There were groups of several players constantly warming up in rotations: first were youngsters, then came seniors, like Zinchenko, Kiwior and Jorginho. The last group was apparently passengers like Sterling.

Game On!

The first half start was very difficult: Dumfries hit the bar in Inter’s first attempt on goal. To be fair it's understandable - the noise coming from the stadium was unbearable. Even on my stand (which was not for the ultras) people were in full voice, whistling, shouting, and generally making their opinions known. Every decision by the referee, every foul was shouted at, and I can't tell you how many curse words Sommer got when he kicked the ball in the air above the box after one of Martinelli's crosses - it's a pity I didn't have a notepad with a pen prepared to write down some of these linguistic gems. 

Slowly Arsenal grew into the game, not without Martinelli's participation. I started to feel more for our Brazilian winger. Inter defended in 5-3-2 shape with a condensed central area and their wing backs were dropping back to close up Saka and Martinelli. They again used the fact that we don't have fully-powered overlapping wing backs. Every time we attacked on the right side, Timber was alone and all the space behind Martinelli on the left wing was available to him. But as we all know, he leaned to the centre and Martinelli was left all alone on his side, often against two defenders. Despite that, Gabi almost never lost a ball, searched for the way to threaten further and delivered a good bunch of crosses. One of them was centimetres away from a custody-free Merino. Another one got Merino's header nearly finding the back of the net (surely, I was already celebrating). It looked like Martinelli was the only guaranteed destination to continue the attack rather than lose the ball.

After Arteta scolded Havertz and Trossard in a short injury break, Leo started occupying wide space on the opposite side (to help Saka find some open space), while Ben White replicated Timber's drift into the central area. This change has set up the trend of threatening Inter's goal that progressed as the game went further. Inter's path through our defence was paved exclusively through Dumfries’s duels with Timber. I thought that since they played together in the national team, Timber would be able to neutralise the opponent. But somehow time and time again Dumfries was able to earn a free kick, throw-in or pass to the teammate. It didn't bring too much benefit apart from the couple of episodes and only happened in the first half (in the second Inter recorded a measly 0.06 xG).

The other annoying thing about this game at San Siro was the lack of any replays for the fans. We were left in the dark, only seeing a "VAR check" message after the fact. The penalty incident happened so quickly and the only thing I saw was a back heel flick from the Inter fella followed up by a referee's whistle. I've been to the Euros game this summer and they had a replay for every crucial moment after just a short delay. But probably the referee has already heard so many threats even without a replay, so they were not going to risk his well-being further. Surprisingly, at half time they started showing all the highlights from parallel Champions League games, including a funny penalty against Villa. It's frustrating that we couldn't get the same clarity for the game we were actually attending.

After the break

I was very excited and a bit surprised to see the Merino->Jesus change after the break. Despite Brazilian’s questionable form, at least it was clear that we left our defensive mindset back in St James Park and went all in for the result. It's definitely beneficial that Arsenal can afford some risk in this tournament and I sincerely hope the second half will set up more confidence for the team to press the Premier League opponents with greater intensity and try to recover and recycle balls as fast as possible. 

Arsenal has launched somewhere between 48 and 73 corners and most of the time it felt like we lacked only a few inches, a small deflection to get the ball into the net. There were so many attempts, that during one of them Raya got bored and went for a chat with a goalkeeper coach on the bench.

Havertz had two very good chances to score. Bukayo Saka has attempted to take on the opponents time after time but he didn't have a proper second half and honestly looked quite exhausted after the 60th minute. But even this was not enough to bring in Sterling, although we didn't anticipate too much defensive work in the closing minutes. 

Again, it was inspiring to see our new Creativity Superhero duo (Nwaneri and Zinchenko) come into play. However much criticism Zinchenko gets for his performances, this time he livened up the flank by overlapping with Martinelli. And with regards to Ethan - again quite a tough opponent for a youngster, but this time he had such an electric moment around the 90th minute! Shame that his shot didn't hit the target. 

What was also inspiring is that we not only did see the captain in play, but we saw both him and Nwaneri on the pitch, which gives me hope that we can continue seeing them together later on in the season where we need to crack the deep block open. And that Nwaneri will continue getting first team minutes, if he maintains his performance levels.

What are our CL prospects now?

With regards to the tournament situation, I don’t think that the defeat to Inter is a problem. Considering that plenty of big teams have dropped points in seemingly easy matches, 17 points should be enough to get into TOP-8. We are sitting on 7 points so we need another 10 from the next four games.

Three victories and an away draw with Sporting sounds very realistic. Girona have lost at home to Feyenoord and got thumped 4-0 by PSV, so an away win there is definitely on the cards. And Sporting would be probably happy with a home draw given their current points tally.

Match takeaways

In general, the aftertaste from the game is much better than expected. At least for me an upward trajectory is now a real possibility if we can consistently apply learnings from our second half performance:

• More gaming time for the natural left backs, whether Zinchenko or Kiwior (who was a part of our impressive winter run), even only for the stretches of the game.

• Partey in the midfield. Let's be honest, he's drifting there anyway.

• Shift some (if not most) of Trossard's time to Nwaneri and/or Odegaard. 

And the victory at Stamford Bridge might become closer than we think! COYG!