Arsenal 1-0 Newcastle: Rice digs deepest to win it

Match report – Player ratings – Arteta reaction – Video

Morning.

A quick Monday blog for you, as I’m heading for the airport shortly to go back to Dublin. The home season finished with a win after a Declan Rice goal was enough to beat Newcastle 1-0.

We were probably lucky to be level at the break after a first half that lacked some energy and precision. Where David Raya was poor with the ball at his feet, he was excellent with his hands – even if some of the chances Newcastle had were down to his iffy kicking. They also seemed able to just waltz through our midfield with ease, which was a bit of a worry. Our best chance of the half came from a corner but Nick Pope made himself big to produce a decent save.

The second half was better almost straight away. Perhaps another ‘pep talk’ from the manager at the break, but some of what we lacked in the first 45 was there. Newcastle are a tough side to play against, very physical obviously, but we competed better. 10 minutes into that second period we went ahead through Rice. Martin Odegaard played the ball across the edge of the box, the finish was excellent, whipped with real pace beyond Pope and into the back of the net.

Ben White had a chance not long afterwards, firing just wide after a good drive towards the edge of the Newcastle area. He was illustrative of how little there was in the tank, spending the last 15-20 minutes stretching anytime there was a break in play. At one point on the halfway line, he was almost doing yoga poses, and you could see that he, and others on that pitch – including some Newcastle players – were feeling the effects of a long, hard season.

The final stages got a bit tetchy. Dan Burn probably should have been booked for throwing the ball at Kai Havertz who returned from injury with a second half cameo; Arteta was booked for the third time this season which means a touchline ban for the Southampton game; and it all finished in weird fashion when there was a scuffle in our box, there was some pushing and shoving right in front of where we were sitting, and the referee seemed to be waiting for VAR to confirm or deny something, but we had no idea what.

Eventually, the final whistle went, Arsenal were winners and second place basically secured at the expense of Newcastle. It was far from a classic, but we did what we needed to do, and did so without being anything like at full power. You could see there were players out there who were basically running on empty, and we also lost William Saliba at half-time to a hamstring issue – definitely a consequence of how much we’ve had to play him this season. Rice, the goalscorer and match winner, looked absolutely shattered, so it’s to his real credit he was able to dig deep enough to produce a goal of that quality to take the points.

Afterwards, the players did their lap of appreciation, and in his post-game press conference, Mikel Arteta reflected on the result and what now lies ahead:

First of all we have one more game to play and to finish it in the right way, and winning in Southampton is going to be really important again and then go on holidays, have time to reset and bring the temperature down a little bit. It’s been a long, long season and we need to start to think and reflect on everything that we have planned is the right one. Start to make some steps, some action and come back here fresh on day one, ready to go again.

And on recruitment this summer:

We have to be very smart with the decisions that we take. Obviously we need players because the squad is really short, and on top of that, we are losing four or five players that end their contracts and their loans are finished. So we need to be sharp, again very disciplined in what we want to do and make sure that we are strong in the season.

There’s a whole summer ahead to think about and discuss that, but I don’t think there’s any doubt internally as to what needs to happen. How? Who? When? Questions I don’t have the answers for right now, but all will become more clear in time, and while this season has been a real slog, I am genuinely excited about how we go about addressing some of the issues we’ve had in terms of squad depth and quality. Other aspects of this season have been beyond our control, but at the core of it all for me is ensuring we create a robustness for next season that will help us cope with some of that.

As I said though, we’ve got weeks and weeks and weeks of it all to come, so for this morning, I’ll leave it there. Just to finish, it’s been a fantastic weekend here in London with great friends and the wider Arseblog and ArsenalVision podcast community. It’s such a pleasure to be able to spend time with everyone, and I look forward to more it next season.

We will have an Arsecast Extra for you but a bit later than usual, we’re recording at some point later this afternoon once I get back home. We’ll put the call for questions in a while on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.

Pod should be out early evening. Until then, have a good one.

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