Wasteful Arsenal made to rue more missed chances

In some games you sense the pattern early. Arsenal missed a couple of early chances and then a third and there was a strange inevitability about the fact that they would go on missing chances and that Manchester United would then score with their first clear chance of the game. As it turned out, it wasn’t even a clear chance. And so when Kieran Gibbs diverted Antonio Valencia’s shot into his own net after 56 minutes, United took the lead without even having had a shot on target. By the end, Arsenal had had 24 shots to United’s 12 and nine on target to United’s two.

Perhaps there is some confirmation bias in the feeling that there’s a template: you see a team become deflated by wasting opportunities and their opponents growing as they survive one raid after another and remember the occasions when the team under the cosh does steal a winner, conveniently forgetting the times when pressure does eventually cause a team to wilt and the goal does come.

But it is the case that there are two phases to determining which team wins. There’s the bulk of the game, played out in midfield as each side tries to create opportunities and prevent their opponents making chances, and then there’s what happens in the penalty area: the sharpness of the strikers and capacity of defenders and goalkeepers to make brilliant interventions (or not to gift goals to the opposition as Wojciech Szczesny did). It’s in that second aspect that Arsenal are really lacking at the moment: they are wasteful in front of goal and they have an astonishing capacity for self-destruction in their own box.

The gut feeling is that, this season, Arsenal are an inefficient team. They need more chances than their opponents to score goals, and contrive to concede almost as soon as the opponent so much as looks at their net. To an extent, the figures bear that out.

Charles Reep, the father of data analysis in British football, is a much-maligned figure these days, but one of his observations that does remain true is that it takes roughly nine shots to score a goal. This season in the Premier League there have been 3084 shots and 323 goals: 9.54 shots per goal.

The best teams, not surprisingly, score rather more frequently than that. Chelsea are the most efficient side in the division, needing just 6.17 shots per goal (mainly thanks to Diego Costa, whose 11 goals have come from just 32 shots). Southampton come next: 6.74 shots per goal, followed by Swansea (7.00) and, perhaps a little surprisingly, Crystal Palace (7.24). The side that requires the most shots per goal is Aston Villa (20.2), followed by Burnley (16.63) and then QPR (14.45).

Arsenal need 10.4 shots for each goal, leaving them twelfth in the overall list. Of course, as with all statistics in football, there is reason for caution: some teams will play a style of football that creates fewer but better chances, some will look to shoot whenever even a half-chance occurs (the Andros Townsend principle), but given Arsenal’s obsession with passing, the way they so often seem to overplay, instinct would suggest that they should be more efficient than that.

Alexis Sánchez has had 33 shots for eight goals, Danny Welbeck 31 for two, Santi Cazorla 30 for none, Aaron Ramsey 25 for two and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain 20 for one. It’s the Welbeck figure that stands out: of Cazorla’s shots 19 have been from outside the box while 11 of Oxlade-Chamberlain’s have been. That perhaps explains their poor strike rate to an extent (although 16 of Sanchez’s have been from outside the box as well). Only six of Welbeck’s have been from outside the box, though.

These are figures for league games only and Welbeck did, of course, score a hat-trick against Galatasaray in the Champions League. Nonetheless, his record does little to challenge the reputation he developed at Old Trafford of being erratic in front of goal.

The bigger issue, though, feels more like the culture at the club. There is a lack of sharpness, a lack of edge, a lack of toughness, and it seems to be affecting everybody apart from Sánchez.