Mikel Arteta 'surprised' by what Martin Odegaard did during Arsenal win

Mikel Arteta says he was just as ‘surprised’ as everybody else that Martin Odegaard decided to take Arsenal’s winning penalty in their 1-0 victory over Crystal Palace on Monday night.

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The Gunners delivered an excellent and battling performance at Selhurst Park and should have gone into half-time ahead, with Eddie Nketiah missing two great chances to open the scoring.

He hit the first against the post before chipping the second over the bar from close range, but he made amends when he touched the ball past Sam Johnstone before being taken down by the Palace goalkeeper.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it was skipper Odegaard who stepped up to take the spot-kick rather than usual taker Bukayo Saka – who missed his last one in dramatic fashion at the backend of last season against West Ham.

The Norwegian kept his cool from 12 yards, sending Johnstone the wrong way and rolling the ball into the bottom left corner.

Odegaard’s strike proved decisive, with two soft yellow cards for Takehiro Tomiyasu seeing the Japan international sent off in somewhat controversial fashion, and the 10-man Gunners had to dig in to claim all three points.

Asked afterwards if it was a conscious decision to make Odegaard the designated penalty taker ahead of Saka, Arteta said he had played no part in deciding who takes the spot-kicks and leaves it up to the players.

Probed on whether Odegaard is now Arsenal’s first-choice penalty taker, Arteta replied: ‘I have no clue, it’s about leadership of players, and if they felt it was the right thing to do, for me I’m fine.

‘They have to make those decisions on the pitch. I was surprised like everybody else, but he scored the goal which is the important thing and we won the game.’

Arteta also reserved special praise for £105million summer signing Declan Rice, who had an excellent game in the base of midfield – a different role from his position in the season opener against Nottingham Forest last week.

Asked how he rated Rice’s display, Arteta replied: ‘I think it was great. He bossed the midfield and dominated the game. He was very influential, both attacking and defending.

‘Today he played a different position to last week because of what we expected from Palace and what we needed today, and I think he was really good.’

On the win, he added: ‘I loved it, absolutely loved it. It’s a really difficult place to come. We played how we wanted to play 11 against 11, we dominated the game, we created enough chances, we missed two very, very huge chances that normally we put away, but we never gave up.

‘We continued the way we wanted to continue. Eddie earned us the right to go ahead with his action, we scored the penalty and then we had to play half an hour with 10 men, which is obviously a conflict that we didn’t prepare.’

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