It was a challenging game, with the odds stacked against us before the game and throughout the early stages of the game. It was a bright start from Spurs looking to get a good hold of possession in the arsenal half, however with ever reliable figures in Rice, Saliba and Gabriel we struggled to get into any real meaningful positions. Set pieces become our nemesis again as Arsenal then won a corner and Hojbjerg was unfortunate in heading into his own net to give Arsenal a football and momentum. From here it would have been easy to sink, but we responded well and had the ball in the back of the net through Van De Ven, however the celebrations were short lived as VAR denied us. It was a ridiculous call from VAR in my opinion as the initial shot had deflected off of two arsenal bodies to fall for Van De Ven who finished nicely, but unfortunately denied. Dejan Kulusevski was clipped in the penalty area, and perhaps a bit too honestly initially tried to stay on his feet. If he went down, surely a penalty would have been given. To rub salt in the wounds, arsenal scored from a counter attack from this incident as Saka schooled Ben Davies. The one thing you do not want to allow Saka to do is cut inside, but that is exactly what Ben Davies did.
It looked like Tottenham were in grave danger of sinking under when Havertz scored from another corner. Tottenham’s defensive record from corners worsening, and arsenal’s strengthening. Havertz did slightly push Van De Ven in the back, in fairly similar fashion to Disasi’s ruled out goal against Villa the night before, however I felt it would have been soft for that goal to be ruled out. Tottenham, 3-0 down and struggling in the 38th minute.
Dejan Kulusevski, Micky Van De Ven and Cristian Romero all had solid performances in their own right. Tottenham kept trying to restore some pride in the fixture, and Romero capitalised on a Raya mistake and clinically dispatched it to make it 3-1, and then Rice kicked Ben Davies in the penalty area, with Michael Oliver directly staring on. Oliver could not have had a better view of the blatant penalty incident and still VAR had to give the pen cause Michael Oliver did not. Son dispatched the pen to put a bit of pride back and give the author some FPL points, but it was a disappointing result in the end to be so close to a great comeback with all these difficult factors and circumstances the game provided, but not quite manage to pull it off.