Bruno Guimarães completes Arsenal comeback to end Leeds’ unbeaten run

Second-half goals from Riccardo Calafiori and substitute Bruno Guimarães earn Arsenal a win over Leeds after the visitors took a shock first-half lead.

Arsenal built the foundations of their new success on a desire for competition, an appetite for battle. But what happens when that spirit is insufficient, when your opponents play just as hard as you do? Well, then you bring on Bruno Guimarães and you play even harder.

Arsenal had just snatched an equaliser against a dominant Leeds side when Mikel Arteta introduced his key summer signing. The former Newcastle captain has been having to bide his time but when he entered the field just after the hour, he turned the game on its head.

Arsenal had been ponderous until this point, even uncertain at times. The passing had been intricate, not incisive, and echoes of familiar weaknesses had put the crowd on edge. Guimarães put paid to all that. Not only snapping into tackles, not only moving the ball at pace, he was desperate for everything to go faster, more aggressively, with sharper intention. Nine minutes after coming on, he scored the winner.

It was a goal that deserved to decide the contest and reflected the best of what the home side had been trying to achieve. Play developed down the left where Noni Madueke had shone, but here it was Bukayo Saka playing a one-two with Martin Ødegaard. The captain then poked a short pass to Declan Rice who – with Guimarães now covering him – had burst into the opposition area. Rice back-heeled the ball to the edge of the area and there was the Brazilian waiting, poised, to steer the ball unerringly into the corner of James Trafford’s goal.

In the time between Leeds’ opener and the winner, Arsenal had five efforts on goal, the same as in the preceding 55 minutes. Once the lead was established, they should have had at least two more goals, with Ødegaard somehow missing from two yards out and Trafford denying Saka in a one-on-one in the final move of the match. Leeds did not feature as an attacking threat in the final half hour, so decisive was the switch in momentum.

Arteta said his team had to “pinch our desire to win” to overcome a visiting side who appear no longer to be punching above their weight, but rather have moved up a class.

“We had to face the challenge because [Leeds] are a team that hadn’t lost in the Premier League,” he said. “They’re in a great position because they fully deserve it. They are incredibly dangerous and we got into a situation, [a goal down] after that defeat against Brighton, 12:30 kick-off.

“It is a bad mixture and we got out of it through … pinching our desire to win, by showing the personality and courage that we have in this team.”

Arteta will be able to take satisfaction from the way his team managed the result, the effectiveness of his substitutes and other smaller details such as the continuing creative contributions of Rice – now with three assists to his name – and a second goal for Riccardo Calafiori, whose buccaneering inside runs have been a feature of the season.

On the other hand, his midfield was outmuscled and outplayed in the first hour, with the opening 10 minutes of the second half a period of dominance for the visitors that deservedly delivered a goal when James Justin finished Gabriel Gudmundsson’s cross after the Icelander had run off the back of Ben White.

Arsenal’s centre-halves, are looking like less of the sum of their parts, with Ezri Konsa and Gabriel uncertain when faced with the accuracy and variation of Leeds’ deliveries.

“It’s a credit to the mentality that Mikel Arteta has created, that even on a tough day they found a way to win”, said Daniel Farke. The German bemoaned the Arsenal equaliser, bundled home by Calafiori after White had knocked down a Madueke cross, believing that if Trafford had got a hand to it, “we would have gone on to take three points.”

With the proviso that there can be no back-slapping in defeat, however, Farke said the match showed his team’s improvement since returning to the Premier League. “We have developed in all aspects,” he said. “You can speak about game management, you can speak about pressing, about compactness against the ball, or quality in possession, or in counterattacks. We were able to compete much better with set pieces.

“Today we came very close to winning an away game against one of the best sides in the world and we played exactly on their level, more or less.”