Newcastle - on the bus. The Bare Minimum

A narrow win over the Magpies keeps us in the hunt, but City are still very much in the driving seat for the title.

The starting XI didn’t half surprise me. Arteta went with Zubimendi and Madueke again, even though they both put in proper questionable shifts at the Etihad. Madueke especially has been serving up stinker after stinker lately, yet he still gets the nod while the likes of Max Dowman and Bukayo Saka are left chilling on the bench.

Noni started this one exactly how he finished the City game. In the 5th minute, after a lovely ball behind the defense, he produced a touch like a carpenter that somehow earned us a corner. We played it short in that new routine where Eze gets the ball on the edge of the box after two short passes. His first go whistled past the post, but surprisingly Newcastle didn’t learn their lesson. Three minutes later, the same play ended with Eze finding the top bins with a majestic strike.

Watching the replays, I still couldn’t fathom what was going through Arteta’s head to sub this man off at the Etihad when we were desperate for a goal. You can moan about his “duel winning” or his link-up play, but he’s proven time and again that if you need a bit of magic in a big game, he’s your man. Easily the best we’ve got. That Etihad decision is still doing my head in.

Back to yesterday, we grabbed that early lead in the 9th minute thanks to a worldie. You couldn’t ask for more when facing a compact Newcastle side at home—the hard work of breaking the deadlock was done. From the 10th minute, I was thinking the lads should be focused on one thing: how can we put past them a couple more to boost the goal difference?

The first half was a bit of a toss-up otherwise. Tonali nearly caught Raya out of nowhere. We were knocking it about their box well enough (even if Madueke was on a different planet to the rest of the team) ... until Havertz broke down again. He’s been made of glass this season. Gyökeres came on, and suddenly we’ve got two odd ducks up top who don’t really know how to link the play together.

At the break, I felt we’d done the job of holding the lead, but the target had to be going 2 or 3 up to put the squeeze on City. We showed not a lot of urgency, though. To make matters worse, Eze flagged for another injury. Thankfully it was just a precaution; I’m glad he didn’t go for the “self sacrifice” Arteta loves to brag about. The sacrifice that some of our players have done that in the past and now they aren’t anywhere near the level required, because their body is not in the same state anymore.

Arteta threw on Martinelli and I was in a state of mild shock. That front three of Madueke, Gyökeres, and Martinelli—the same lot responsible for our most toothless attacking performances this term—were back out there. It’s simple: none of them actually connect the team to play well. Martinelli and Gyökeres are finishers who need service, while Madueke is just playing his own game.

I don’t know how Arteta and his staff don’t see it. How can you keep rolling these three out and expect goals? Trossard was on the bench, and he’s the closest thing we have to Eze’s skill set. He had Dowman there too, and could have rolled out both Martinelli and Dowman to keep two “number tens” on the pitch. But Arteta didn’t.

And expectedly our attacking power started to fade. It’s getting clear that Madueke was an Arteta-driven signing. He gets chance after chance, despite serving several stinking performances in a row, while someone like Norgaard doesn’t get even a single chance to start. And the defensive prowess that Arteta so much admires, is also missing from Noni’s play. Several times across the game, he was losing his marker a few seconds before noticing and sprinting back in agony trying to recuperate for his mistake.

Mind you, even with that front three we had chances to kill the game. Rice gets to the edge of the box, but instead of having a crack, he faffs about and fluffs a pass to Gyökeres. Why would a player with one of the best strikes in the squad have so little confidence in front of goal?

Then Gyökeres tracks a Newcastle man back into his own half and nicks the ball. The Emirates was about to erupt, the crowd was proper up for it. He gives it to Martinelli, who instead of picking out the two runners to ride the ecstatic wave, decides to keep the ball and passes it all the way back to the keeper.

Safe football. I’m disappointed with that mindset. How can you ask the fans for noise when you’re passing it back to your own keeper instead of going for the throat?

To top it off, Zubimendi couldn’t find a simple pass to Gyökeres in the box when the Swede finally had the space he craves.

Another golden opportunity to pad the lead wasted. Newcastle had a few decent looks themselves, but they were kind enough to absolute butcher them, like Wissa did later on.

There was that moment where Gyökeres was chasing a ball in behind on a rare counter and got hauled down by Nick Pope. The ref could’ve easily given a red, but it was just a booking. People are fuming that VAR didn’t step in, but in my book, they were never going to. It wasn’t 100% clear Gyökeres would’ve got there before the defender, so it was not an “obvious error”. It was a cynical foul, but the ref on the pitch bottled it. That’s the problem with VAR—the on-field ref won’t make a big call because they have a “safety net,” but the VAR won’t overturn unless it’s a disaster”, so they stick with the original call, even if they would have taken another decision independently.

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The last injection of hope into the team and the crowd happened when Saka was reintroduced on the pitch and Myles Lewis-Skelly finaly appeared in midfield. Bukayo completely changed the vibe on the right, but his shooting boots are still missing. The ref added 7 minutes, and we had the biggest chance of the lot—a 4-v-2 counter. Gyökeres managed to screw up the pass and find an opponent’s leg instead of his two wide-open teammates.

He had half the pitch to find a teammate, yet he hit a Newcastle defender. That’s criminal execution. Any player in this Arsenal squad should be making that pass in their sleep, even if it’s not ideal. In a title race, that’s just not acceptable, just like Havertz’s misses at the Etihad.

I was fuming—we’re level on points with City and it’s likely going down to goal difference. To not take the chance to improve it when you’ve led for 81 minutes is a failure in my book. But the manager? He had a completely different reaction.

That celebration at the final whistle was a utter disgrace and an embarrassment! It shows you exactly the level of ambition this manager has. A 1-0 win was the bare minimum to stay in contention for the title. Not to stake a claim, not to get an edge in the race, just to stay in it, because one City win puts them back on top. Why is he celebrating achieving the bare minimum like he’s won the league? Why are we celebrating just “staying in contention”?

Winning 1-0 today is like scraping an away draw in a Champions League first leg. You’re still in it, but there’s a mountain to climb. Why didn’t Arteta celebrate like this after a 1-1 in Leverkusen? I don’t believe for a second this is the celebration of a man who set up in half time a goal for a team to be 3-0 up at the final whistle.

Newcastle were poor in execution and gave us plenty of chances on the break. They’re 14th in the table, for crying out loud, and they are playing like a mid-table team! Everyone’s forgotten that this was the only game where we actually had a week’s rest. The next two league games have Atleti Madrid sandwiched in the middle. Fulham won’t be easy after a mid-week game, and West Ham are in a proper dogfight with Spurs to avoid the drop—they’ll fight until the last minute. This was our best chance to fix the goal difference and we bottled it.

When Arteta talked about the race “not being over” and it coming down to a “shoot-out,” I thought he understood we needed goals. These celebrations tell me he’s not ready to take a risk. He’s planning to crawl over the line in every game and pray City drop points. And the fans saying they’re “happy with the win” are really in the same boat!

For how long will this manager, the fans and this club put the title hopes into Man City do us a favor? How about we take matters into our own hands? Imagine if they went into their next game knowing they had to win by three to keep up—that puts them under proper pressure and might force them to open up and be punished by the opponents.

I hear people saying “we aren’t a high-scoring side” or “we’re in bad form and you can’t expect the team to suddenly start scoring”. Sorry, but when you lose to Bournemouth and then at the Etihad, you lose the right to just “grind it out.” Not using home games to build goal difference is basically handing the title to City. And let’s not pretend that “they might struggle as well”. We all know Pep can easily rattle off 5 wins in a row during the run-in.

Arteta’s celebration shows he wants to play it safe with this low-risk rubbish and hope City slip up. This safe, low-margin football got us to lose all the points lead in 2026, so it clearly doesn’t work. We need to be more risky, more aggressive, more creative. Less sideways passing and more taking the game through the middle.

But Arteta isn’t doing that. He’s stuck in this “safety-first” mindset, serving up uninspiring, low-chance football until the end of the season. He keeps playing Gyökeres, Martinelli, and Madueke together and can’t see the glaring problem. He’s used the same double pivot all season waiting until one of the midfielders drops dead. He’s turned sideways build-up to get a ball to the winger on the rouchline into a religion because it’s the least dangerous area to lose the ball.

It’s frustrating because I don’t see a manager who understands he has to grab this last vanishing chance for a first league title. The players, at least, didn’t seem to share his level of joy.

They put everything in on the pitch and mostly just looked gackered. They weren’t ecstatic because they know the state of the leage table. I reckon the gaffer has drilled these safety-first rules so deep into their heads that they’re scared to take a risk. That’s why I’d really like to see this group under a different manager— I believe there’s a level of creativity in them just waiting to be unlocked.

To be clear, it wasn’t a bad result. It was the bare minimum that keeps us still on the back foot in the title race. And the bare minimum shouldn’t be celebrated like that. Shaking hands, feeling a bit of relief? Fair enough. That’s what I mostly saw on the players’ faces.

On Wednesday, however, it’s going to be a completely different story. It helps a lot that we play the first leg away from home. We don’t need to think about scoring and creativity, we can just deploy this exhausting style of football that keeps opponents at bay and takes the life out of them. We can sit deep, we can pass sideways and wait for them to come at us and open up the gaps in the back. Two holding midfielders? Why not.

And we can exploit these gaps with Gyokeres, who is definitely set for a start at Wanda Metropolitano. My hopes for goal scoring until the rest of the season lie on the shoulders of Eze and Saka if he finally manages to take back former control of his legs and the body. But not necessarily on Wednesday, on Wednesday it would be a one last time where “Artetaball” might actually be the right shout.