As much as any year before it, 2014-15 demonstrated the importance of starting quickly in the English Premier League. Chelsea was nowhere near the dominant side in the latter half of the season that it was in the autumn and early winter, and yet its incredibly strong start carried the club to a league title. Unfortunately, it’s not a model Arsenal appears to have been keen to follow in kicking off the 2015-16 campaign.
At this stage we’ve moved past the disappointing 0-2 opening loss to West Ham, and you can read our post-match thoughts here. The trouble now is that things might not get drastically easier in Week 2, as the Gunners are set to visit a Crystal Palace club that opened the season with a strong 3-1 win at Norwich.
Goal painted the Crystal Palace opener as the result of a couple of controversial calls, and certainly the newly promoted Norwich will view things similarly. Specifically, the post-match report cited a would-be equaliser from Cameron Jerome and a rejected penalty that would have gone to Sebastien Bassong as having influenced the outcome. But what Arsenal has to worry about this coming weekend has little to do with called-off goal opportunities for Norwich. Rather, it’s the ease with which a rejuvenated Crystal Palace side was finding the back of the net.
This same problem seems to have gotten the attention of betting.betfair’s football news section, which has looked ahead to the Week 2 matches across the Premier League. “Arsenal could find themselves in the line of fire again on Sunday,” writes Andrew Atherley in his weekend preview. The same preview goes on to cite some favourable odds for those betting on goal totals. It also points out that since Alan Pardew took over at Crystal Palace, the club has been particularly aggressive against better opposition. Evidently, six out of the team’s nine occasions scoring more than 2.5 goals have come against top-half clubs. This implies that at least in part, Crystal Palace’s strategy against more talented foes is to go at them and attempt to make it a firefight.
Given these statistics, our own aforementioned concerns about Arsenal’s defensive core, and the fact that the Gunners just let up two goals at home in the opening week, it appears we’ve reached a tricky point early this season where a journey to Selhurst Park looks suddenly daunting. Let’s not lose perspective here: Arsenal is the vastly superior team and is nearly at full health early in the season. The most probably outcome is for the Gunners to steady the ship with a strong result against Crystal Palace this weekend, but the pure goal scoring trends have made this one a scare.
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