Arsenal led Manchester City twice. They still came away with nothing.
But this doesn’t feel like another episode where we simply list everything Arsenal did wrong.
Because for periods at the Etihad, I liked what I saw. Arsenal pressed aggressively, caused City problems and showed flashes of the team we were watching in pre-season. Then City changed the game from their bench and Arsenal couldn’t change it back.
So what happened?
In this episode of Trailblazers, I look at Renée Slegers’ substitutions, Arsenal’s recurring problems managing leads, why Géraldine Reuteler and Selina Cerci remain so difficult to understand from a squad-planning perspective and why I’m not convinced by the argument that seven summer signings mean we should simply write this season off as a rebuild.
We also need to talk about Renée herself. Has she lost the dressing room? Should Arsenal be considering a change? Or is the bigger problem that she appears to have stopped trusting some of the ideas she was developing with this squad only a few weeks ago?
Five points from five WSL games is nowhere near good enough. But after watching this game back, I’m frustrated rather than hopeless.
The international break has come at exactly the right time.
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