Mark Hughes knew he had this game won the moment he saw Arsenal’s team sheet. A callow back four, diffident in the air, by the admission of Arsène Wenger a little “tender in the tackle”: it was not the kind of opposition the Stoke City manager felt was going to materially change Arsenal’s wretched record in the Potteries.
“We wanted a fast start,” Hughes, who had selected Peter Crouch for the first time in a month specifically to challenge Arsenal’s aerial hesitancy, said. “We talked about it beforehand and we felt that if we put the ball into good areas we’d have a chance against the back four we were facing.”
Within 20 seconds, Arsenal’s Britannia groundhog day had begun all over again. Almost from the kick off, a cross from Steven N’zonzi arrived in the visitors’ box to spread panic. Utterly incapable of adequately clearing the danger, the back four conspired to allow Crouch to shoot home from four yards.
Even more hapless defending followed. When Jonathan Walters scored the third just before half-time, five Arsenal players had attempted to head away the same cross without any of them actually getting airborne. With their manager apparently fearful of entering his technical area (“they love me so much here I didn’t want to give them the opportunity to show their love” was Wenger’s explanation for remaining rooted to the bench) Arsenal’s first-half showing brought new definition to the term surrender.
“I’ve been an away player here before and I know it’s not a nice place to come,” Crouch, whose intelligent contribution to his side’s victory was central, said. “I’ve been here with Spurs, with Liverpool and as a big club you’re like: ‘Do we really have to go to Stoke?’?” Yet to disparage this as a route-one rugby team bullying a bunch of ball-playing technocrats into submission (as Wenger has done after previous Britannia capitulations) would be wholly to misrepresent what happened.
For 45 minutes Stoke were better at everything than their visitors. Their passing was crisper, their running more purposeful, their interchanges more dynamic. In Bojan they had a player the equal of any of Arsenal’s creative talents. Forming a brilliant Little and Large combination with Crouch, the Spaniard was both tricksy and determined. Picking up his partner’s nicks and lay-offs he terrified Arsenal’s retreating backline every time he got the ball. What will have alarmed the visiting supporters was that he was inducing panic not through bruising physical challenge but by the application of skill and pace.
After scoring a sublime goal when he ran unchecked on to Walters’s cross to volley home, Bojan appeared to have put Stoke four up early in the second half when his lovely run exposed Arsenal’s melting butter resistance. At that point the white flag was flapping above the visitors’ dug out. But the goal was ruled out because Mame Diouf was adjudged (wrongly) to be offside and interfering with play, and Arsenal suddenly found themselves able to work a way back.
A penalty from Santi Carzola and a neatly taken drive from Aaron Ramsey gave Stoke a troubling last 20 minutes, when they should have been cruising. Indeed, if Alexis Sánchez had scored instead of hitting the post after an incisive solo run, Stoke’s admirable first-half work would have been undermined. With Bojan tiring, Hughes was candid about his side’s undistinguished response to Arsenal’s tardy comeback.
“Sometimes when we’re under pressure we’re guilty of reverting to type and instead of having the control that we’re trying to develop here, we lose it somewhat,” he said of his team’s hoof and hope conclusion to the game.
Though, even as Stoke lost shape and purpose, Wenger was being optimistic when he claimed that Arsenal might well have forced an equaliser had they not been reduced to 10 men by Calum Chambers’s dismissal soon after their second goal. The truth was, having spent most of the match with his defensive colleagues going collectively AWOL, it was only when he was shown the red card that anyone realised Chambers was actually out on the pitch.
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