Was Opening Day-Defeat Just a Blip for Arsenal?

Few fans will have suffered the same dramatic mood change as the Arsenal faithful over the first weekend of the new Premier League season.

From the elation of beating Chelsea in the Community Shield and appearing to make a decisive move to end their goalkeeping issues by signing Petr Cech, the Gunners were brought back down to earth with a bump after a 2-0 defeat at home by West Ham United.

It’s a feeling that’s all too familiar for Arsene Wenger and his team, who have made an unfortunate habit of starting slowly in recent times. With the title race often won and lost not through the tail end of the season but at the beginning, Wenger’s men will be acutely aware that another poor start can quickly turn a season into a salvage operation.

Arsenal’s defeat to the Hammers was made all the more chastening by the fact that their squad was virtually unchanged, while their opponents were bedding in several new faces, including 16-year old Reece Oxford. The question is—was Arsenal’s lacklustre performance merely a blip or was it indicative of something more worrying?

The Gunners tend to endure several games a season, often at home, when they are forced to break down a wall of players. With some rustiness still showing from pre-season, it wouldn’t be overly surprising for one of these very fixtures to occur early on in the campaign—they started the 2012/13 season with two successive goalless draws.

Frank Augstein/Associated Press

However, this familiar pattern was not the one that the game against West Ham followed. While the Hammers were relatively limited in terms of the number of goalscoring chances they created, so too were Arsenal.

While the Gunners did register 22 shots to West Ham’s eight, the number of shots on target was six to four, respectively, with Arsenal players resorting to shooting from outside the box seven times, per WhoScored.

The possession stats tell a similar tale of Arsenal being on top but by no means dominating, with the Gunners having the ball for just under 62 percent of the game.

So, was the loss a blip? It is perhaps somewhat unfair to expect Wenger’s men to be at their scintillating, suffocating best so early in the season, and Arsenal fans will take some bitter solace in the fact that both goals arguably resulted from errors by Cech, who is normally a picture of consistency and dependability.

Daniel Ochoa de Olza/Associated Press

However, some worrying themes that emerged last season have returned again. Arsenal’s need for a striker—and their apparent pursuit of Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema—has been well documented, and their limitations up front were once again readily apparent.

Olivier Giroud was required to lend a physical presence to proceedings but offered little in the way of penetration or guile. Theo Walcott and Alexis Sanchez looked similarly ineffective when brought on to try and pierce through the West Ham defence.

Another recurring theme that Arsenal fans would have hoped had been banished was the lack of an obvious Plan B. Wenger’s philosophies are well-known, and in his time at Arsenal, he has rarely offered concrete proof that he is capable of switching styles in order to counter teams that can effectively stop his players’ short passing game.

Despite Wenger's insistence that he'd rather the transfer window shut before competitive league football was played, per the Daily Mail, he must act on what he learned from the opening fixture in order to prevent a blip becoming the story of their season.