Kai Havertz scored his first goal of the season for the London club Arsenal on Saturday. Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, and Ben White all found the back of the net for the Gunners in their 4-0 victory against Bournemouth, which allowed Arsenal to keep their perfect record intact.
Arsenal, led by Mikel Arteta, moved up to second place in the standings with 17 points, one point behind the champions Manchester City, who suffered a loss on the road against Wolverhampton Wanderers.
In the meanwhile, Andoni Iraola’s winless Bournemouth team fell into the relegation zone and are now ranked 18th with three points after playing in seven matches.
Although Arteta and Iraola are familiar with one another from their time spent playing for the same junior team in the Basque Country thirty years ago, it was the Arsenal manager who emerged victorious in a match that was lopsidedly won by Arsenal.
Early on, Bournemouth showed promise by keeping Arsenal pinned in their own half. However, it was the away team who made the first breakthrough in the 17th minute when Odegaard broke through the wall with a superb ball to the back post.
Gabriel Jesus, who was playing on the side at the time, made an attempt to smash his header in from a tight angle, but the Brazilian’s effort bounced off the post and dropped to Saka, who headed the ball into an empty goal.
Just before the break, Odegaard scored a second goal for Arsenal from the penalty spot after a foul committed by Max Aarons on Eddie Nketiah. The low shot that the Norwegian took was perfectly placed to beat Neto’s defence and into the back of the net.
The Bournemouth defence became too anxious, and six minutes after the resumption of play, Arsenal were awarded a second penalty after Arsenal’s Jannik Odegaard was brought down by a reckless challenge from Ryan Christie.
But Saka and Odegaard, the club’s main penalty takers, sent the ball to Havertz, who placed his attempt away with aplomb to relieve a significant responsibility off the shoulders of the 65 million-pound ($79.28 million) acquisition. Havertz’s performance lifted a huge burden off the shoulders of the signing.
A deflated Bournemouth were hopeless, and despite the fact that Neto stopped Emile Smith Rowe twice, he was helpless in additional time when White finished off the thrashing by looping a header into the net.