Published: 14 January, 2014
by RICHARD OSLEY

Premier League
ASTON VILLA 1, ARSENAL 2

ARSENAL made life more difficult than it needed to be at Aston Villa last night, gasping for the final whistle to signal an away win which eventually took them back to the Barclay’s Premier League summit.

The Gunners made sure all of the top seven teams took maximum points with a 2-1 win.

But the warning signs were there for what might derail the missions that lie ahead. In complete control at Villa Park after scoring twice in a minute during the first half, Arsene Wenger’s men showed the casual complacency that risks undermining their spirited attempts to secure an unlikely title win in May. 

With 14 minutes left, Christian Benteke’s stooping header put the three points needlessly in doubt. The goal came directly from a Santi Cazorla error, his misplaced pass being a key assist in the build-up.

Suddenly, a game in which Arsenal seemed to be cruising was in the balance, and there was some frantic defending as Villa, desperate for points for a different cause – staying up – sought a point that would have been scarcely believable at half-time.

Testing their own fans’ patience, the Gunners needed convincing that running the ball to the corners and eating away at six minutes of injury time would be wiser than beetling into the box in search of a third goal. Only Jack Wilshere seemed to possess the calmness to slow the game down and draw the sting from Villa’s sudden interest. He was the man of the match and his goal, a smart shot from just inside the box, stroked into the bottom corner after half an hour, was a crucial settler. The Gunners had seen all of their top four rivals win over the weekend and seemed anxious to match them. The job seemed done when, 17 seconds from the re-start following Wilshere’s goal, Olivier Giroud, the lone striker, pulled down Wilshere’s lofted pass and clipped the ball past two defenders and Villa goalkeeper Brad Guzan.

The life in the game was punctured. Arsenal spent the rest of the first half and a large share of the second tossing passes around to each other and rarely venturing forward. Giroud is a hard forward to fathom. His goal looked top class but his other efforts, wayward headers and misplaced shots, betray him. His second half was particularly ineffectual, yet he was still calling the players forward late on when Wilshere and Mesut Ozil were instead urging for the Gunners to pass out the extended injury time. It was one of those unnecessarily tense finishes that Arsenal have become accustomed to, and besides the surrendering of a home lead to Everton just before Christmas, have generally seen through, to their credit.

There will be talk of how Laurent Koscielny and even more so Per Mertesacker marshalled the rearguard in the frenzied final quarter of an hour. A new spirit will be hailed. But one bounce of the ball another way and Wenger’s team would have been considered bottlers after a weekend of successes for the other teams contesting the top spots.

“That’s part of the English game,” Wenger said after the late tension. “Sometimes you are a little bit powerless when you are under pressure. But we scored top-quality goals. In the first half we were top quality but showed a different aspect in the second, a more fighting spirit. It’s a very important win for us.”

Arsenal: Szczesny, Sagna, Monreal (Gibbs 66), Koscielny, Mertesacker, Flamini, Wilshere, Gnabry (Rosicky 69, Rosicky replaced by Oxlade-Chamberlain 86), Cazorla, Ozil, Giroud.
Attendance: 36,097