Declan Rice headed down the tunnel shaking his head and muttering to himself. Arsenal had just forfeited precious ground in the title race, Mikel Arteta looked incapable of smiling again and Rice seemed to be struggling to comprehend his inability to exert any sort of real control over midfield.
With Arteta’s defence incapable of suppressing the excellent Anthony Gordon and the outstanding match-winner Alexander Isak on a day when Arsenal made a litany of uncharacteristic unforced errors, Eddie Howe’s team remembered how to be streetwise and reaped deserved rewards. After five Premier League games without a win Newcastle look upwardly mobile once more.
Howe had used his manager’s notes in the match programme to issue a reminder that playing the best sides “brings out the very best in us”. Any notions that this might be wishful thinking were debunked when Isak connected with Gordon’s superb right-wing cross to expertly head Newcastle into a 12th-minute lead after stealing in between Gabriel Magalhães and William Saliba.
Until then Arsenal had been the better team but, despite swiftly reasserting their earlier monopolisation of possession, they did precious little with it, struggling to hurt Newcastle. Tellingly, they registered one shot on target in a game of very few chances.
Admittedly Fabian Schär somehow scrambled a menacing Bukayo Saka cross to safety before Lewis Hall’s courageous block came between the former Newcastle midfielder Mikel Merino and a viciously volleyed goal but Arteta’s frown suggested he was not overly optimistic. Merino, later withdrawn, endured a return to Tyneside to forget.
Almost every time Howe’s side counterattacked, Arsenal’s overly narrow backline wobbled a little. Howe, presumably aware of Jurriën Timber’s penchant for stepping into midfield from left-back, had deployed Gordon on his less preferred right flank, leaving the impressive Joelinton to attack the left.
With Gordon looking a natural in a role he would never have volunteered for, Arteta’s defenders found themselves dragged repeatedly into places they did not really want to go and Isak’s intelligent positioning emphasised why Arsenal’s manager harbours a longstanding interest in recruiting the Sweden centre-forward.
Arteta is also believed to be an admirer of Bruno Guimarães and that opinion would presumably not have been altered as he watched the Brazilian – deployed at the heart of midfield on a day when Italy’s Sandro Tonali began on the bench before replacing Joe Willock – persistently interrupt visiting attacks, while winning quite a few clever free-kicks along the way.
Hats off too to the former Arsenal midfielder Willock, who alongside Guimarães and the much-underrated Sean Longstaff, ensured Rice and friends most certainly did not have things all their own way. Behind them Hall, yet another player improved by Howe’s coaching, shone at left-back, largely second-guessing an unusually subdued Saka. Much more of this and Hall will surely be summoned to the England squad.
Tino Livramento is already part of it and Howe’s right-back did well, too, ensuring a consistently wrongfooted Gabriel Martinelli never really hit his stride. Arteta’s decision to start Thomas Partey at right-back proved a failed experiment, his reversion into midfield arriving too late to properly readjust the power balance.
It took a decent stop from David Raya to keep a low Isak shot out as Arteta began reshuffling his pack, introducing Oleksandr Zinchenko at left-back and augmenting his attacking armoury with Ethan Nwaneri. Maybe he should have started the 17-year-old; Nwaneri was certainly an awful lot livelier than the anonymous Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz.
The newcomers were soon joined by Ben White and Gabriel Jesus but Newcastle’s formation, quite apart from defending incrementally ever deeper, morphed from 4-3-3 to 4-5-1 as they succeeded in making things scrappily stop-start, ensuring that the visitors rarely settled into a convincing passing groove.
At one point deep in the second half Nick Pope went down apparently injured, offering his teammates a chance to regroup as the physios took their team “treating” him, but time-wasting was far from purely responsible for securing Newcastle a third victory against Arsenal here in the past four seasons.
Although Rice spurned a highly inviting late headed chance, directing Saka’s fine cross wide, a draw would have been a bit of a travesty on an afternoon when, not for the first time, it seemed that the injured Martin Ødegaard really is irreplaceable in Arteta’s midfield.
