Arsenal's Anger After Defeat to Betis in Dublin

Mikel Arteta walked off the Aviva Stadium pitch with a 3-1 defeat on the scoreboard and a dressing room full of players, in his own words, “fuming.” Preseason or not, this one stung.

Real Betis punished a series of Arsenal mistakes in Dublin on Wednesday night, racing into a 3-1 lead by half-time and then calmly seeing the game out as the Gunners’ rhythm disappeared amid a flurry of changes.

Sloppy start, ruthless punishment

Arteta had gone strong from the outset. He named an unchanged XI from the side that dismantled Girona 4-1 on Friday, with Kai Havertz, Viktor Gyökeres and new signing Christos Tzolis all starting again. The idea was clear: continuity, cohesion, another step towards competitive sharpness.

What he got instead was chaos in his own box.

Nine minutes in, Kepa Arrizabalaga came for a corner and got nowhere near it. The ball sailed over him to the back post, where Rodrigo Riquelme thrashed it in. One delivery, one flap, one ruthless finish. Arsenal were behind and rattled.

The gift-wrapped chances didn’t end there. When Betis goalkeeper Álvaro Valles passed the ball straight to Tzolis, the Greek forward had the kind of opportunity new signings dream about. He couldn’t take it. Betis survived, regrouped and then landed a punch of their own from distance.

Nelson Deossa stepped up from 30 yards and unleashed a thunderbolt into the top corner. No deflection, no doubt. 2-0, and Arsenal’s back line looked exposed and uncertain.

Hincapié strikes, Fornals hits back

For a few minutes, Arsenal responded with the kind of authority Arteta wants to bottle for the season ahead. They pressed higher, moved the ball quicker, and finally forced Betis into the kind of error they themselves had been making.

Valles misjudged a corner from Tzolis, misreading the flight as the ball swung in. Piero Hincapié attacked it and powered his header home. Suddenly, the noise inside the stadium lifted. At 2-1, the game felt alive again.

Then came the moment that sent tempers flaring in the Arsenal camp.

Havertz, dropping deep to link play, gave the ball away cheaply in a dangerous area. Betis pounced. Pablo Fornals, once a familiar Premier League presence at West Ham, collected the loose ball and swept it beyond a rooted Kepa. No movement from the keeper, no second chance for the defence. Arsenal went into the break 3-1 down, undone by their own lapses.

Inside the dressing room, the mood matched the scoreline.

“Very upset, given a hard time. They are fuming, but this is good. That’s what we need,” Arteta told reporters when asked about the interval atmosphere.

Changes, disruption and a flat second half

Arteta had promised minutes, and he delivered them. By full-time, 25 Arsenal players had featured. The most notable introduction came at the back: Gabriel, playing his first football since Brazil’s World Cup round-of-16 defeat to Norway, returned to action.

Those wholesale changes at half-time, though, stripped the contest of any real flow. The intensity dropped, the patterns broke, and with both sides rotating heavily, the second half became a training exercise rather than a comeback mission.

Neither team carved out another clear-cut chance. For Betis, that suited the evening perfectly. For Arsenal, it left the first-half errors as the defining story of the night.

Arteta did not hide from the result, but he did frame it.

“Well, the important part is to win it and we didn’t manage to win it, so disappointed obviously for the result,” he said. “It’s true we used 25 players, so you need to give a bit of context to the game.

“In the first half, with more starters, two very different things: how we played and how we competed, because we had some fantastic moments in the time we played.

“The way we competed especially in and around our box in a number of standards that we are used to, so there are things to improve obviously, some positives to take from the game and then a bad result sometimes it’s good to create even more fire in the belly.”

Fire is exactly what he will expect to see next. Preseason offers leeway, but not immunity. When a manager talks about standards “in and around our box,” he is drawing a line. The question now is how quickly this angry night in Dublin sharpens Arsenal for the battles that really count.