Madueke's Deflected Strike Gives Arsenal a 1-0 Win at Forest With Their Only Shot on Target

Arsenal won a Premier League game on Sunday with one shot on target. Noni Madueke, on at half-time, cut in from the left in the 80th minute and his shot deflected off Jair Cunha, wrong-footed Matz Sels and gave Arsenal a 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest, Sky Sports reports. Forest, who had two of the match’s three shots on target, lost their third game in a row and dropped into the relegation zone.

How did the goal finally come?

From the first change Mikel Arteta made, after 80 minutes of possession had produced nothing on target. Arteta gave Eberechi Eze a first league start of the season, and it did not work: Sky Sports records no Arsenal shot on target in the first half, with Gabriel’s set-piece effort cleared close to the line by Ousmane Diomande and Kai Havertz heading wide from a Declan Rice free-kick. Madueke replaced Eze at half-time. At 66 minutes Arteta changed three more, Jurrien Timber, Viktor Gyokeres and Mikel Merino, and the game’s best move followed, Timber cutting back for Rice, who put the chance over the bar.

The winner came from the earlier change. Madueke skipped in from the left, took on Daniel Munoz and found the top far corner courtesy of the deflection off Cunha, Opta Analyst reports. Forest still had time to take something: Rice blocked a Chris Wood shot in the 89th minute, Murillo drove forward and curled wide in stoppage time on his 100th appearance for the club, and Ezri Konsa made a late challenge to deny Liam Delap. Oliver Glasner’s verdict to Sky Sports was the plainest summary of the afternoon: “It was their only shot on target, and this one was deflected.”

Why was Madueke the likely scorer of a goal like this?

Because away grounds are where he scores. Opta records that Madueke has scored 13 of his 17 Premier League goals away from home, 76 percent, including all four of his goals for Arsenal. Among players with 15 or more goals in the competition’s history, that is the highest away share anyone has posted. A scruffy, deflected winner at a ground where Arsenal have found life difficult, scored by the squad’s most away-weighted scorer, looks less like a coincidence once the split is on the page. The numbers behind splits like his are the kind tracked on this site’s Premier League records page.

One report of the game called the goal Madueke’s first for Arsenal. Opta’s count says it was his fourth, all of them away, and the record above cannot exist without the first three. The first-goal version is wrong, and it is worth saying so here because it is already travelling.

What does the bench pattern say about this Arsenal side?

That the wins are being finished by the players who did not start. Opta records that each of Arsenal’s last three Premier League wins has been decided by a substitute’s winning goal: Bruno Guimaraes against Sunderland, Guimaraes again against Leeds, and Madueke at Forest. The scoreline fits the same habit. Since Arteta took charge in December 2019, Arsenal have won 32 league games 1-0, level with Everton as the most in the league in that span, Opta reports.

Arteta’s own account to Sky Sports was about patience: Arsenal had done something they had not done in the two seasons before, which was win this fixture, and the margins were always going to be small unless the game opened earlier. The contrast with the club’s most famous side is built into the numbers: the Arsenal Invincibles season was won by a team that scored in every game, while this side is collecting the league’s most 1-0 wins. Both are title habits. They are just opposite ones. Sunday’s other one-goal Premier League argument, Brennan Johnson’s disallowed goal at Hull, turned on a subjective offside; this one turned on a deflection, and nobody disputed either the goal or the count of shots that produced it.

How bad is Forest’s home problem now?

Bad enough to have a short historical list attached to it. Forest have not scored a league goal at the City Ground this season. Opta makes them the fifth side in English top-flight history to fail to score in their first four home matches of a season, after West Brom in 1921-22, Everton in 1998-99, Crystal Palace in 2018-19 and Huddersfield Town in 2018-19, and one of two sides in Europe’s big five leagues without a home league goal, alongside Schalke. They have won one of their last 15 league games at home.

The awkward part for Glasner is that the defending is not the problem. Forest held the champions to one shot on target, had two of their own, and got a performance their manager called top level defensively. They sit 18th anyway, on five points from seven games, because home games keep ending with their own column at zero. A side can survive a lot in this league, but it cannot survive a home ground that produces no goals, and Forest’s next home game now carries a record nobody at the club wants extended. The other end of the one-goal game showed up on Friday, when Yehor Yarmolyuk’s headbutt drew a red card but no penalty in Brentford against Liverpool: there, one incident decided a match. At the City Ground, one shot did.

What happens next for both clubs?

Arsenal move on with the pattern intact and the question sharpened: a run of wins decided by substitutes is depth working as designed, until the week a game like this stays 0-0 and the same bench is asked why it produced nothing. Forest’s week is simpler and harder. The home scoring run, the relegation place and the missing Morgan Gibbs-White, who was out injured on Sunday, are the whole agenda, and the first of those three is the one Glasner can least afford to carry into another home fixture.