Erling Haaland's goal in the first period seemed to have the three points for visitors, but the equalization of Gabriel Martinelli in additional time enabled the former FC Barcelona coach to win, even on Sunday. The former Brescia coach has thus reached a new personal record as a coach.
City was a few minutes from a victory going up to Arsenal, but Martinelli changed everything. The Gunners midfielder Declan Rice said it was the greatest domination of his team against the Guardiola team, and the statistics confirm it.
Guardiola sets an unwanted personal record
According to Optajoe, City posted 32.8 % ball possession of Arsenal, the lowest average possession of a ball of a Guardiola team during a first division championship match (601 in total) during his career. The former coach of Barça and Bayern Munich has been a coach for almost 20 years and is renowned for his style of play “Tiki-Taka” based on the domination of the ball. It is therefore a significant statistic.
Everything is bad for Guardiola
Before the match, City faced its rivals Manchester United and Naples in the space of a week. According to Guardiola, this explains the more defensive approach and less focused on the high pressing of City against Arsenal.
“We cannot do any analysis without talking about what happened this week. We played difficult matches against United and Naples. Bravo to the team and its resilience. When you lack pressing efficiency, it's always difficult. I think the result is right ”, he said.
We have made a few transitions, but I think Arsenal was better. It is a better result than last season, and better against United last week, so we accept. They were better and we were tired. We made an emotional match against Naples, then we had four or five hours to arrive in London. It was very hard, but we were there. You had to be very mentally strong and we did it. We are very tired, we have a lot of injuries, with John (Stones), (Rayan) Cherki, (Rayan) Ait-Nouri, Nathan (ake) absent, and then (Abdukodir) Khusanov injured.
