Proper news from Britain - News from Britain you won’t find anywhere else. Not the tosh the big media force-feed you every day!
There will be days when Arsenal’s candidacy for the title is properly tested, but anyone who expected West Ham to provide such an examination was proven to be stuck in the past.
And therein lies the difference between old and new for Mikel Arteta. In the previous two seasons, we have seen Arsenal lose this fixture on their interminable marches to the same second rung of the ladder, but not here. Not now.
This was a walk. A stroll. The kind of low-key hiding where Arteta’s side never came close to a slip and where the best to be said for Nuno Espirito Santo’s sorry bunch is that they were not blow away on the wind. Maybe that would have been a small mercy.
There is balance to be added somewhere, because 2-0 away at Arsenal is hardly a disgrace. But the white lies of the numbers concealed the whitewash of the performance - David Raya did not need to make a single save.
Part of that was traced to the multifaceted cluelessness of West Ham, a team in desperate trouble already, but most of it was down to the imposition of talent and control from Arsenal. Better in every department.
As such, four league wins became five, three clean sheets became four, and barely a drop of sweat was spared. That is what Arteta’s second gear looks like these days.
If we were to be excessively critical, to search for disclaimers in the table, then we might draw ourselves to the quality of Arsenal’s finishing. That was the sole drawback for Arteta in midweek against Olympiacos and it was a natural reflex to two goals from 21 attempts here.
On that front, Viktor Gyokeres extended his scoreless run to six in all competitions and, more worryingly, he is still struggling to find a rapport with the creative masters around him. For now, there is a disconnect with the intentions of Eberechi Eze, Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka that cannot be excused by hard running and endeavour alone.
But that is to pick at nits. On balance, Arsenal were able to tick off a comfortable win in close proximity to a European fixture and did so without overburdening any of their key elements.
That is the luxury afforded by this exceptionally deep squad, and it was shown once more when Odegaard succumbed to his latest injury – a banged knee in the first half – and Martin Zubimendi somehow brought the level up in his absence.
He was involved in both goals, with the first scored by Declan Rice and the second converted from the penalty spot by Saka on his 200th Premier League appearance.
Before, in between and after, Arsenal were never threatened. Rice, in particular, was excellent, both as a screen that killed any pressure at source – usually no closer to his goal than the halfway line - and as a springboard for waves of attacks.
Of course, that all has to be balanced against the opposition. And Arteta knew it, which is why he stacked the deck with attacking options – his courage is often doubted but today’s version of West Ham don’t exactly inspire inhibition.
In the minutiae, that meant a deeper role for Eze, replicating an experiment tested recently against Port Vale in the Carabao Cup. It worked well.
There was also a concerted tactical effort, a desperation even, to open supply lines or forge a meaningful synchronicity between Odegaard and Gyokeres. That one didn’t succeed.
For the better part of 25 minutes, Odegaard would take the ball, scan for his striker, and set about finding a way of bringing Gyokeres into play as a priority. Too often, Gyokeres was on the wrong shoulder of the last defender, which is shaping into a theme this season.
The latest effort to finesse the dynamic was brought to a halt around half an hour in. Odegaard had clattered his left knee against Crysencio Summerville and was sufficiently hurt to come off, necessitating a spin on Arsenal’s wheel of high-class replacements. Zubimendi would go on to thrive.
He won possession in the build up to the first goal and was then central to its key phase by slipping a tidy ball behind Mateus Fernandes and El Hadji Malick Diouf for Eze, who embarrassed both men with his quicker read of the pass. When Eze’s shot was saved, Rice buried the rebound.
As with the Olympiacos win, there was a mystery in how the score wasn’t wider by the break. Saka and Jurrien Timber were a pair of overlapping menaces on the right - they shredded Diouf quite mercilessly – and Rice owned the middle, but the possession was not matched by output. Eze took some blame for that with a pair of misses; the mistimed runs of Gyokeres was the sharper issue.
Naturally, there was no threat of a sucker punch and the penalty for 2-0 killed any suspense.
Zubimendi was again involved, floating a ball over Diouf for Timber, prompting the full-back to clumsily bundle him over from behind. Saka had Alphonse Areola beaten on the run-up and sent him the wrong way.
It summed up both teams.
