If Arsenal win the Premier League title, it will be thanks to the goalkeeper and Nicolas Jover, but it will be a victory to a much smaller extent than the set-piece manager's celebrity suggests.
By half-time, Micky van der Ven's goal was ruled out for narrow offside, Christian Romero's header hit the post and another narrowly missed the target, and Son Heung-min sent the bar wide at the end. He hit a shot that went over. One-on-one with David Raya.
Tottenham had never lost to Arsenal and had similar quality and type of chances. Their xG was 0.67 compared to Arsenal's 0.70, but they lost 0-3.
Saka scored a typical Saka goal (too bad no one told Ben Davies), cutting in from the right, featuring a cool head in tight spaces and a great change of play from Kai. After a quick break from the front and back, he slipped the ball past Guglielmo Vicario. Havertz. It was a rare bit of absolute quality from the Gunners. A match in which they otherwise struggled to assert any real authority.
Spurs fans had to endure two celebrations from Arsenal's head of set pieces, Nicolas Jobar. The first time was Pierre-Emile Hojbjorg with a brilliant header into his own goal, and the second time when Kai Havertz continued his fine form, scoring eight goals in recent games. 11 Premier League games.
Jover became a celebrity among assistant coaches by standing up every time the Gunners took a corner or free-kick. There is no obvious reason why, but if a set-piece coach is teaching set-pieces effectively, players should not require any input during the match. – except that he gets maximum credit for each of the 16 goals they have scored from corner kicks this season. Maybe he gets more recognition than he deserves.
Arsenal's third goal of the game, and second from a corner, was scored by Declan Rice, who crossed the ball to summer signing Kai Havertz, who nodded the ball in as Tottenham players stood and watched. The elation of Arsenal's success with set-pieces is at least more than a result of the “minor annoyance” Gary Neville has said of Jover to avoid calling him a self-righteous piece of shit on live TV. It has as much to do with reinforcement.
Of course Arsenal deserve credit for that. It makes perfect sense to always pay attention to set pieces when building a Premier League team. That's why they won this match, and a big reason why they're still in title contention.
They have a team of giants with great in-swing deliveries through Bukayo Saka from the right and Rice from the left. And while it's true that Jobber instructs his team to run forward from the back post and uses some of them to block opposition defenders, he doesn't rely on the two elements he's always made his team to be dead. I don't want you to think I'm a ball wizard. It's good delivery and big guys that succeed in situations like this.
Arsenal didn't produce any significant points from open play apart from Saka's goal, but that was simply due to their relative lack of fluency compared to their dominant win against Chelsea, and we'd say I have to say, “A champion's performance.” That may have been the case in the first half, but chaos reigned in the second half.
On BBC Radio 5 Live before kick-off, Mark Schwarzer was left with little choice but to praise David Raya's virtues, due to doubts and an inexplicable obsession with the Golden Glove Award for demonstrating a goalkeeper's qualities. There was nothing left.
He has kept 14 clean sheets this season, two more than Jordan Pickford, and will likely win the Golden Glove Award. But if Arsenal win the title, they will have won it despite him.
What was he thinking? What was the best outcome of his success in dinking the ball against Christian Romero? In any case, the man behind Romero was Dejan Kulusevski. We know what the worst outcome was. A goal for Spurs and a return to a game that should have been over Spurs. It was a foolish decision by a goalkeeper who boasted a record of no goals conceded.
In front of him were Ben White, William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhães, who were all incredibly good, but they were in front of him for almost the entire season. And so he did when the Brentford loanee faced 2.18 shots on target per game (no goalkeeper has fewer). It's one of the worst things to stop them in the Premier League.. He's simply not very good in any way as a goalkeeper, and signing him permanently based on a clean sheet would be a foolish decision for a recruiting team that doesn't produce very bad players. .
Of course not in terms of the intensity of the set-pieces that won the North London derby and could have won the Premier League. Thank goodness for their “slightly annoying” Nicola Jover, although not as much as his celebrity claims.