FA Premier League
ARSENAL 1 (Odegaard 72)
HULL CITY 0

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IT will only sound spoilt to complain, but Arsenal fans will surely be hoping it doesn’t always have to be like this.

Top of the league going into yet another international break having won nine out of ten matches, the Gunners have raced six points clear of Manchester City with other rivals also playing catch-up. They have certainly have a magnificent defence which has conceded just five league goals and today (Saturday) kept a seventh clean sheet of the campaign.

And yet the conundrum remains: they enjoy this control without really yet showing their brilliant best going forward. There is still an allergy to the net that Mikel Arteta should be wary could come back to haunt him in his mission to become the first Arsenal manager to win back-to-back titles since the 1930s.

It was true that Arsenal bossed the proceedings against Hull City from nearly start to finish and created a healthy helping of scoring opportunities. Arteta was pleased enough with this supremacy “I’m delighted with the win,” he said afterwards. “To go into the international break with a win is one of the best things. I thought we were the better team, had enough chances to score and make it bigger for ourselves and we weren’t efficient enough to take them. We then had to rely on generating volume, plenty of persisting until we finally broke them down.”

But at some stage there will need to be a serious internal look at the finishing. The club is still crying out for a Wright, a Henry, an Aubameyang — a centre-forward who gobbles up one-on-ones and knows not to fire straight at a goalkeeper. Arteta himself acknowledged the issue, noting that Arsenal were “one-on-one with the keeper twice” and that “sometimes we try to score the perfect goal against these low blocks”, adding: “We need to be much more chaotic than that.” They need to be more ruthless too.

So as the second half dragged on with Hull holding on to a 0-0, it was not obvious who would break the stalemate beyond one of the defenders coming up to score, as happened in other deadlocks this season. At different times Kai Havertz, Noni Madueke and especially Christos Tzolis looked as though they needed to stay behind at training for target practice. Tzolis probably put in his weakest shift since his summer arrival, and Eberechi Eze did not look much better when he replaced him. Madueke at least contributed towards the winning goal, even if he spurned clearer chances of his own.

Again, isn’t it amazing that these feelings can exist about these performances when Arsenal are comfortably on top? But you do wonder whether they could be stopped, home and abroad, if they had a galactico central forward to match what is becoming a galactico defence.

Arteta could argue there are sensible reasons not to go all guns blazing in every match. He wants his team to be major contenders in both the Premier League and the Champions League, a schedule he has learned is exhausting if not handled correctly.

“It’s been very demanding, a short time to recover from games because of the travel,” he said, while praising the “mentality and character” of the squad.

The supporters, though, are buying their tickets each week knowing they are not purchasing permits to a goal fest. This is more akin to the continental football of the 1990s, when we used to watch Serie A’s big teams often holding what they had rather than trying to score as many as possible.

The answer to the question — who? — turned out to be the captain.

In the 72nd minute Madueke cut inside and drove a shot that Hull goalkeeper Konstantinos Tzolakis could only parry. Martin Odegaard nipped in to poke the rebound into the net. By that stage the team was playing with an intensity that had made a breakthrough likely, and the game was decided on one drop of concentration by Hull, with the keeper flapping and the visitors’ defence struggling to react.

Arsenal may not have had to wait quite so long if they had been awarded a penalty at the end of the first half. Kai Havertz had his shirt clearly pulled by Nobel Mendy inside the box. Referee Farai Hallam was sent to the monitor by VAR (Michael Oliver) and confirmed the foul, only to then rule that Havertz had been offside and award a free-kick to Hull instead. It was perhaps inevitable that the Gunners would be at the centre of such a complaint less than a week after escaping a penalty when Jurrien Timber snatched at Alexander Isak’s shirt against Liverpool.

Arteta was surprised by the outcome: “When they sent the referee to the monitor, I was being told it was a clear penalty for a pull. They decided not to give it because of the starting position of Kai — he was offside — so I’m not sure what the interpretation is.”

A check on the laws later suggested the decision was wrong. Because the foul occurred before Havertz had played or challenged for the ball, the holding offence should have taken precedence; the offside only becomes relevant once a player in an offside position becomes active by attempting to play the ball.

In the end, Odegaard’s late intervention spared everyone further debate. Arsenal head into the break six points clear, another clean sheet banked, and with the familiar Arteta refrain that he is happy but they can still do better.

ARSENAL: Raya, Timber, Konsa, Gabriel, Calafiori (Hincapie 69), Rice (Merino 63), Bruno Guimaraes (Zubimendi 89), Madueke, Odegaard, Tzolis (Eze 69), Havertz (Gyokeres 63)
SUBS NOT USED: Arrizabalaga, Lewis-Skelly, Mosquera, White

HULL CITY: Tzolakis, Coyle (Norton-Cuffy 61), Ajayi (Herrington 69), Egan, Mendy, Stroud, Iroegbunam (Mouzakitis 75), Gourna-Douath, Slater (Giles 75), Cho (Gelhardt 60), McBurnie
SUBS NOT USED Butland, Hjerto-Dahl, Thomas, Vaz