Man City v Arsenal will be defined by tactical trend and a strange twist

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

If Mikel Arteta seems unusually relaxed about the absence of Martin Odegaard, some of that is actually an effort.

The manager of course knows exactly the cost of losing such a player but part of his long-term preparation with this Arsenal squad is to never dwell on anything that could be perceived as a negative. Arteta has spoken extensively to psychologists about this and the idea is that you can’t change a problem like this, so there’s no point speaking about it in a way that could play on his team’s mind.

It’s best to look forward after taking a hard-earned point against Atalanta in Bergamo... which is a phrase with a few meanings as regards Sunday’s match at Manchester City.

The idea may be all the more important if Odegaard is indeed out until November, as some recent chatter suggests, but also given the exact nature of this game.

The onus is very much on Arsenal, rather than City. They are the challengers, they are the team that have twice finished second to Pep Guardiola’s side, and they’re the team now second again. Arsenal as a whole haven’t won at City at all since 2014-15.

All of that is also in a context where this fixture abruptly became much more stand-offish at the start of last season, before Arsenal were so criticised for being satisfied with a 0-0 draw in this same fixture last season. It has widely been cast as costing them the title, and serving as a warning for this season.

The reality is it would be ridiculous for Arteta to be guided by that, not that he will. The argument was always rudimentary, and absurd.

No single result costs a team the league when they’re up against a project that achieves an average of 91 points a season. That’s especially not the case when Arsenal actually took four points off City last season.

What really cost Arsenal was that they didn’t have as many resources as the champions, and weren’t as advanced as a team. Arteta's side otherwise pushed themselves to a higher level than the season before, going from 84 points to 89, while claiming four points off City when it had previously been none.

That was progress, that came from Arteta’s staff seeking to maximise every detail in the most calculated way.

It is probably why this is going to be a similar sort of game. The absence of Odegaard likely means that Arteta’s decision in midfield is going to be counterintuitively easy. He will doubtless seek to make it as physical as possible, with perhaps only Jorginho offering a different type of defensive play in his passing nuance. More interesting will be the attack, and just what shape Arteta chooses. Will it be Gabriel Jesus moving between the lines or Kai Havertz playing as a false nine? That offers another contrast with City, given Guardiola’s entire team is now retrofitted from Erling Haaland’s obvious starting place.

By the same token, is it a positive for Arsenal that the Norwegian’s scarcely believable scoring run was ended against Internazionale on Tuesday, or is it a negative, since he'll now be hungrier? Both managers would probably publicly say that isn’t important. More relevant is perhaps how Haaland hasn’t yet scored against the Gabriel-William Saliba partnership in three games.

That comes from how that duo has grown together, but also how Arteta has reshaped the team around a supreme defensive base. Arsenal are even harder to break down than last season, as that record of one goal conceded in five games so far this season illustrates.

That comes from a wider context, that further conditions this game. As was written on these pages before the start of Arsenal’s Champions League campaign, elite football has now moved into the post-Guardiola era. There are two ironies to that, especially since it is still led by Guardiola and his mentees such as Arteta, but also how a lot of it at least feels like the pre-Guardiola era.

Jose Mourinho is known to have laughed at the nature of that notionally decisive 0-0 at City last season, since the excitement didn’t really get beyond the infamous “s**t on a stick” 0-0s between the Portuguese’s Chelsea and Liverpool two decades ago. It is almost as if the positional game and pressing have now evolved so much that the most innovative managers have to take it further - and consequently right back around.

The answer to pressing is to stand off and bait the opposition, only for similar managers to also stand off. A potential solution is to knock it long, as both Haaland and Arsenal’s wide players have benefitted from recently. Even the physical size of such players has gone from short technicians to six-foot physical “warriors” of the type Mourinho loved.

That is likely to make this another stand-offish game, rather than any arguments about needing to win. It is tactically smart, especially if you lack a playmaker like Odegaard. It may be even more pronounced if Kevin De Bruyne is also out. This supposed showdown may well be another dull game devoid of ingenuity; all tactics rather than theatre. Then again, with De Bruyne, Arteta knows from his own tricks not to believe such injury news until you see it on the team sheet.

If the match consequently goes as expected, and Arsenal struggle to create chances for the third game in a row, it will probably bring more debate about their attack without Odegaard. That is admittedly looking like a bigger issue than expected, even as Arteta insists on brushing it off. They lack players of that creativity, and it is too soon for obvious successors such as the highly-rated Ethan Nwaneri. The situation, however, might also amplify the importance of Raheem Sterling against his old club.

It could be set up for a big game for him, rich with narrative. The fixture arguably needs something like that, except there is of course a bigger storyline, and an even wider context.

Football has thrown up another of those narrative twists that the sport has always made a virtue of, in how this is City’s first Premier League match since the competition’s hearing against them started on Monday. Arsenal haven’t just been their main challengers in that regard. Executives like Tim Lewis are known to have been the most vocal on such issues behind the scenes, as well as state ownership. Arteta, by contrast, is known not to really talk about it at all.

It does add greater uncertainty to the match, even as both managers so concertedly try to impose control. There is the live and real possibility that the meaning of any result will change by April. City, of course, insist they are innocent.

If they are sanctioned, though, Arsenal could lose this weekend and eventually end up well off the pace only for City to be deducted points and drop way down. The view of some prominent Premier League figures is that the goal for any title challengers this season should be to just stay ahead of everyone else after City. It is exactly how this entire situation has an authentic effect on the feel of the sport as it's played.

It actually lends an extra strangeness to the encounter, hanging there in the background. It’s just far from the only way the thinking around this fixture has been turned on its head.