There was a good moment at the final whistle here. Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho shook hands brusquely on the Old Trafford touchline, turned to walk off, then realised with a shared prickle of awkwardness they were heading the same way, the world’s most awkward shared hundred metre stroll ahead of them. Wenger did the decent thing, taking a couple of paces then stopping and pretending to fiddle with his coat. It was deftly done and no doubt a sensible move, the thick black cloud above Mourinho’s head almost visible as he stalked off at the end of a 1-1 draw from which Manchester United really should have taken three points.
Arsenal were lucky here. There is no disgrace in being outplayed for periods at Old Trafford, not least when United click, as they did here, with Paul Pogba all indolent craft, Juan Mata buzzing and Marcus Rashford providing speed up front. The more positive spin is that Arsenal got a point while playing poorly. It was, though, hard to avoid the impression this was a point snatched in part out of their own muddle, a performance that never thrummed up through the gears, and a chance to go out and actually beat one of their major rivals was once again passed up.
Right up until the late shift that rejigged a flat, lateral midfield Arsenal looked to have blinked here. Useful points aside, their record this year against Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham and the two Manchester clubs reads played nine, won one, lost four, drawn five. A wise man once wrote that for an entity to be genuinely happy and functional it must first truly want to exist. Discuss, using no more than five sides of A4, in relation to Arsenal and genuine, full-blooded, white-knuckled title chases.
By the end here Wenger had dismantled the oddly flat, samey Mohamed Elneny-Francis Coquelin central fulcrum, and replaced it with Aaron Ramsey and Granit Xhaka, a midfield that does at least look like it genuinely wants to go out and win a football match at Old Trafford. To select one workaday, lateral, do-a-job central midfielder seems sensible enough. To pick two looks like self‑defeating caution.
In Wenger’s defence, a lack of muscle in the middle has been exposed by Mourinho teams before, most glaringly in the 6-0 defeat by Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in 2014, which quietly euthanased Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s central midfield career. But at some point, not least when this is your team’s strength, you do have to play a little, too. Elneny is a good, neat player, but he is essentially a VW Polo of a footballer, matched here against Pogba’s high spec, quiveringly cantilevered four wheel-drive-mobile. At one stage late in the first half Elneny and Coquelin tried to oversee a rapier counter-attack, an odd spectacle as the ball pinged back and forth between them, like watching a particularly stodgy rugby line trying to lumber forwards, only backwards passes allowed.
Clearly Wenger does not entirely trust Xhaka, his £30m midfield summer signing, who is on the face of it a superior all-round player, able to pass and run and shoot as well as tackle and cover, not to mention a more imposing athlete with a greater reach and mobility.
Here Coquelin and Elneny struggled to hold their ground against the power of Pogba and the progressive passing angles of Ander Herrera. With half an hour gone United began to dominate in midfield, not so much storming through Arsenal’s centre as leaning on it like a plasterboard wall and feeling the screws start to bend. They should probably have had a penalty for a slight but significant tug by Nacho Monreal on Antonio Valencia.
Ahead of that flat midfield the ploy of using Alexis Sánchez as a mobile centre‑forward did not stick on this occasion. Sánchez’s energy and movement has been key to Arsenal’s altered sense of menace in recent weeks. Wenger, the alleged tactical Eeyore, has adopted elements of the Klopp-Pochettino forward blitz to good effect.
At the start Sánchez appeared furiously game as ever, right leg bandaged, huge flapping black gloves paddling the air. This was not really his game though, or indeed the best way to test a Phil Jones-Marcos Rojo central defence, the equivalent of unleashing a series of cunningly angled body punches when your opponent has come out with the point of his glass jaw raised in your direction. Here Arsenal at no stage roughed up or got an arm around that makeshift-looking defence right up until Oliver Giroud leapt prodigiously to power a fine late equaliser, their first and only attempt on goal.
Until then this was a game Arsenal looked like losing. For much of the second half United’s panzer tanks rolled through those scurrying yellow shirts. Theo Walcott was simply Theo Walcott, a player who, to borrow a phrase from cricket, has not so much played 400 matches as a professional footballer, as played the same match 400 times.
And yet for all that, they took a point. Mata’s fine second-half goal might have killed the game. Instead Arsenal surged and scored late as they had against Paris Saint-Germain in similar circumstances. Laurent Koscielny was as ever quietly excellent. Oxlade-Chamberlain crossed well for Giroud’s goal. And for all the slight sense of having bottled up his own team’s strengths, Wenger will have made that touchline walk with a little more spring in his step.
