Arsenal 0-1 Man City: The tedious inevitability of defeat

Match report – Player ratings – Video
I don’t know what it is about games against Man City, but I find them strange. I didn’t really expect to get anything from this one, so it’s no surprise that the most in-form team in Europe made it 18 wins in a row, and yet it was still somewhat disheartening.
Is it because losing by a single goal, the only goal, is the tightest of margins and if just one move had gone our way we could have nicked something" Is it because of the machine-like quality of Pep Guardiola’s teams" His Barcelona were incredible to watch but Lionel Messi gave them something extra. Since then he’s replicated the super-efficient, relentless football Pass-a-tron 3000 at Bayern and City, but without the great entertainer to make them as enjoyable to watch. They are the football equivalent of death by a thousand cuts (not a typo).
Is it because with each defeat to them in the league we’re reminded of how big the gap is" It was just one goal yesterday, but you always felt that City could get that goal at any point if they really stepped it up a bit. Is it that we try and convince ourselves that ‘just’ 1-0 isn’t that bad, considering they scored three against Chelsea, and four against Liverpool" That’s no comfort when you’re a club like Arsenal whose mindset should never be in that place, regardless of reality.
Part of it must be the way we continually concede early goals. Whatever the pre-game team talk consists of, the message about keeping it tight for the first few minutes doesn’t seem to get through. This Tweet from Orbinho tells you plenty:
Minutes of Man City's first goal in their last six visits to the Emirates
2nd
3rd
2nd
14th
15th
5th
Definition of giving the opposition a goal start.
— Orbinho (@Orbinho) February 21, 2021

On the one hand, conceding so early does give you plenty of time to get back into a game, but it can also set the tone and be a considerable set-back. A blow to your gameplan, and yesterday Mikel Arteta said they’d got something wrong in the tactical set-up early on. He mentioned the ‘overloads on the sides’, and we did cope better as the game went on, but even with that in mind, conceding a header to one of the smallest men on the pitch is really irritating. That it turned out to be the difference in the end made it even more so.
Raheem Sterling is a wonderful player, but that’s not the goal I was worried about him scoring yesterday. Maybe you could put some of it on allowing the cross to come in, but this was a big error from Rob Holding. Arteta said:
Sterling cannot head that ball. He?s clever and it?s really good execution but if you want to win against them you cannot concede that goal.
The goal itself felt crushingly inevitable. The frustration is how it was scored. If there was one aspect of Holding’s game this season which has been very good, it’s aerial...