Mikel Arteta felt he had no choice.
The Arsenal manager saw his right back Ben White receive a yellow card in the first half of the Champions League game against Shakhtar Donetsk on Tuesday, and quickly came to a decision.
White needed to be removed at halftime.
“We have played enough with 10 men in the recent period,” Arteta said with a smirk.
It is becoming abundantly clear: Arsenal has a discipline problem — and it might yet cost Arteta’s team a shot at the English Premier League title.
Arsenal has had three players sent off in the opening eight rounds of a league campaign that is seeing yellow cards being dished out at an unprecedented rate.
It continues something of a running theme under Arteta. Since he arrived as its manager in late 2019, Arsenal has collected 18 red cards in the Premier League — five more than the next team.
Tellingly for Arteta, the only games where Arsenal dropped points this season — the 1-1 home draw with Brighton, the 2-2 away draw at Manchester City and the 2-0 loss at Bournemouth on Saturday — came when the team had a player dismissed.
“We cannot continue to play with 10 men, especially at this level. You see how we struggled,” Arteta said this week. “We need to eradicate it, it’s clear. Why, the reason, how — it doesn’t matter. We have to focus that it has to happen.”
It particularly has to be happen on Sunday, when Liverpool visits Emirates Stadium in the headline match of the league’s ninth round.
Liverpool is in first place, one point ahead of second-placed City and four clear of third-placed Arsenal. A win would put Liverpool seven points clear of Arsenal already — hardly an insurmountable deficit at this stage but one which would leave Arteta’s players with little wiggle room. Perhaps more importantly, it would likely leave Arsenal six points behind defending champion City, which is expected to swat aside winless Southampton on Saturday.
Arsenal’s disciplinary issues come at the start of a season that has seen an average of 5.1 yellow cards awarded per game so far, according to league statistics supplier Opta.
That is far more than any previous Premier League, says Opta, which points out that last season’s 4.2 yellows per game was a new record — surpassing 3.7 per game in the 1998-99 season.
Two of Arsenal’s dismissals — Declan Rice against Brighton and Leandro Trossard against City — saw the players in question each collect two yellow cards, the second for time-wasting by kicking the ball away.
William Saliba was handed a straight red against Bournemouth for bringing down Evanilson near the halfway line and denying what was adjudged to be a goal-scoring opportunity.
Saliba, perhaps Arteta’s most important defender, will miss the Liverpool match as a result, at a time when Arsenal is already without captain Martin Odegaard (ankle) and might also be missing star winger Bukayo Saka (hamstring) and summer signing Riccardo Calafiori, who came off against Shakhtar with a twisted knee.
Liverpool will arrive on the back of 11 wins from its first 12 games in all competitions under new manager Arne Slot. That run contains six straight away victories, which is a club record for the start of a single campaign.
“Arteta has done an amazing job in the last few years,” Slot said after Liverpool’s 1-0 win at Leipzig on Wednesday, “and we have to be on top of our game to get a result.”
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Steve Douglas is at https://twitter.com/sdouglas80
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