Analysis: Courageous Chelsea dig deep as Arteta gets big calls wrong

Football writer Alex Keble analyses the 1-1 draw between Chelsea and Arsenal on Sunday and what it means for the title race.

It isn’t often that Chelsea supporters enthusiastically cheer the final whistle of a 1-1 draw but the home players deserved the applause for a courageous, battling, and invaluable point against Arsenal.

Normally Moises Caicedo is the man leading the way when Chelsea hustle like this, yet it was his over-exuberance that left Chelsea playing with 10 men for almost an hour.

Enzo Maresca’s side had been the better team before the red card – and they refused to yield after it.

Mikel Arteta was relatively satisfied with a draw, too, on the balance of play and given that both William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes were absent.

Arsenal managed just eight shots, their fewest in a Premier League match since October 2024, while they faced 10+ shots (11) for only the second time this season.

Chelsea were feisty, bruising opponents in a typically full-blooded London derby. A draw was a decent result for both sides.

Courageous Chelsea performance keeps title race alive

From the outset Chelsea pressed hard, took the game to Arsenal, and played with conviction.

Remarkably, that only seemed to increase after Caicedo’s red card. Maresca takes the plaudits for refusing to change formation or bring another midfielder on when Chelsea were down to 10, instead remaining in a 4-2-3 formation.

It meant that for almost an hour Chelsea had more right-backs on the field than central midfielders.

Incidentally Reece James, technically the former but playing as the latter, was arguably the best player on the pitch.

But they would not relinquish territory in the first half, and then, continuing their momentum after the break, Chelsea took the lead within three minutes of the restart.

It’s no less than they deserved, and although inevitably they dropped a lot deeper in an attempt to preserve the lead, it speaks volumes that Chelsea won 58.2 per cent of their duels and 70.7 per cent of their aerial duels today.

“I think we showed we are heading in the right direction,” Maresca told Sky Sports.

“I think we are better than last season. We are closer. We'll see where we are in February and March and then we'll assess our target.”

That fighting spirit has kept the title alive. Chelsea remain just six points off the top of the Premier League table while Manchester City, after scraping past Leeds United on Saturday, have cut the gap to five points.

It also leaves open the possibility that the midweek round of matches could see huge changes at the top.

Arsenal host Brentford on Wednesday and then travel to Aston Villa three days later; tricky fixtures that might see their lead further diminished a week from now.

Arsenal can’t make extra man count 

For all of Chelsea’s strengths, Arteta might look back with regret upon some of his decisions at Stamford Bridge.

His initial system had Mikel Merino play as the falsest of false nines, dropping into deep central midfield so that Gabriel Martinelli and Bukayo Saka could lurk into centre-forward positions ahead of him.

Arsenal appeared a little stuck, unable to pass forward quickly enough as they found the two wide forwards separated ahead of a congested central midfield, as Arsenal’s average positions graphic for the first half indicates.

Arsenal average positions in first half

Arsenal had just two touches in the opposition box during the opening 45 minutes, their fewest in the first half of a Premier League match since December 2021.

Things improved substantially when Martin Odegaard and Noni Madueke came on, forcing Chelsea deeper, and after the equaliser – extraordinarily, Saka’s first Premier League assist in exactly one year – it felt like only a matter of time before the dual No 10s Eberechi Eze and Odegaard would force the winner.

But Arteta decided to substitute Eze for Viktor Gyokeres, removing creativity and fluency from the final third. All of a sudden Arsenal had no coherence, Chelsea pushed back, and the visitors’ momentum ebbed away.

Tellingly, Gyokeres, who came on in the 72nd minute, had just two touches of the ball.

“We lacked certain detail, especially in the manner that we attack,” Arteta said after, lamenting the lack of control his team exerted following the red card.

Fatigue, not just from playing every three days, but fighting in such a high-intensity derby today, was a factor – but so too were those second-half changes.

Odegaard’s return and Caicedo’s suspension gives Arsenal edge

Within moments of coming on to the pitch, Odegaard grabbed the ball, passed it, demanded it back again, and then repeated the cycle with another two Arsenal players.

The captain was determined to take charge of the match and remind the fans what they have been missing.

Along with a goal contribution from Saka – who built on his first assist of the season against Bayern Munich in midweek with another one here – that should make Arsenal’s the more optimistic set of supporters.

The Gunners are top of the Premier League without either of their star playmakers contributing much this season. If today’s game marked their respective returns, Chelsea and Man City should be concerned.

Chelsea fans might be already. The red card to Caicedo was their seventh of the season in all competitions, a habit that will derail their title bid if it continues.

Caicedo is now set to miss Premier League matches against Leeds, AFC Bournemouth and Everton.

Maresca clearly wanted that fighting spirit, because from the first minute his team were revved up, itching to get stuck in.

But Chelsea must walk that line better, or else Arsenal – whose only real flaw is open-play chance creation, and who welcomed back one of the league’s best in Odegaard.