Anyway, our first defeat in the Premier League this season.
My sense is that Arsenal are nowhere nearly as settled, or as comfortable in themselves, nor as confident, as they were last season.
We miss the heft and strength of Granit Xhaka, although Declan Rice was a superb buy.
And Kai Havertz is - to me, at least, - an inexplicable signing; I don't know what exactly it is that he is supposed to do on the football pitch, - he is not a forward, not a finisher, not a dribbler, doesn't hold the ball (as a midfield player), and doesn't - and refers not to - control or direct games (from midfield); one recent entry in one of the Arsenal blogs acidly remarked that Havertz "looked like more awkward foal than goal threat".
Moreover, I'm not comfortable with Raya (yes, he can play with the ball at his feet, but passing and faffing around in your own area invites the pressing attention of opponents, and gives you a lot less time to react to errors), still less as a replacement for Ramsdale, who was excellent for almost all of last season, but who seems to have been identified by Mikel Arteta as a weak link.
More to the point, the team are not yet completely comfortable with this system, and I get the sense that Mikel Arteta is still experimenting with and tweaking what he thinks might work.
Unlike last season, the team has yet to settle, (and yes, I understand that in the modern world - cup competitions and European competitions, one may need to rotate a team and rest players) as a unit - I get a sense of nervous skittishness from the team, unlike last season's sense of the team gelling as a unit.
Yes, we have injuries (Timber - on his first game, and he will be out for the entire season, Thomas Partey, ESR, and Zinchenko among others), while Odegaard seems fatigued, and Saka - who is heroic - is consistently fouled (some very ugly stuff today) on a weekly basis and receives little by way of protection.
Of the injured players, Thomas Partey - who is excellent, actually superb, when both fit and available - increasingly, unfortunately, is neither.
I've seen stats for his injuries - one blog observed that "he’s being held together with bits of string and duct tape" - and he has missed over 50 games through injury since he joined the club, and has started once since last May in midfield.
Emile Smith Rowe is another player whom I would have liekd to have seen more of, but, having just clawed his way back into contention, has, unfortunately, fallen to yet another injury.
Eddie Nketiah is a good optional extra as someone who can score, is especially good against bottom teams (last week's hat-trick), but cannot be relied upon to put away chances against serious teams - is a poor finisher - and is extraordinarily inconsistent.
However, at this stage, I think that there are some deeper issues, some of which lie with the manager, (and I am not a person who wants to wield pitchforks at managers, and, moreover, Arsenal tends to have a tradition of retaining managers for quite some time).
Mikel Arteta seems to have a couple of blind spots: One is that once a player is consigned to Arctic regions, cast out of the team, (Ramsdale is only the most recent example of this process, or tendency), it is very diffiuclt for that player to plot a way back.
Secondly, there have been some - a sequence - of brutally bad (and strangely expensive) purchases, which suggests a lack of due diligence, strange scouting, or a weird myopia: Pepe, David Luis, - and now, I suspect that Kai Havertz may fall into this category - players who were never a good fit for Arsenal, and never even had the promise that they might work out - all come to mind.
Worse, Arteta seems prone to the very human problem of not wishing to admit to errors, or mistakes; while some players are consigned to an internal Arctic exile, others are defended - and comtinue to be defended - beyond what their performances merit, (Raya and Havertz are two recent examples).
In other words, Mikel Arteta has favourites: Players who are "in" (sometimes improbably), and players who are "out", and he seems to find it diffiuclt to move the dial from wither setting, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
And thirdly: I do wonder whether Arteta's insistence on his interpretation of pressing (in faithful homage to his mentor, Pep Guardiola), - both in his legendarily tough training sessions, and during the actual games - is contributing to the injuries - not just the fact of the injuries, but the types, and frequency of injuries suffered by players on the team, and the fact that some of the players, ominously early in the season, are already suffering from something akin to bun out.
Anyway, at this stage, (unlike last season, when the team was a more settled unit), I think that we will not be challenging seriously for the Premier League title, and, in fact, I would argue that - on current form - (not just two defeats in a row, but the nature of those defeats, for all of our possession, we never seriously looked like scoring tonight) we will be doing well to secure qualification for the Champions League by claiming fourth position in the Premier League.
