Arsenal and Manchester City played out a peculiar Premier League match that shifted between periods of incredible intensity and moments when neither side seemed particularly bothered by the outcome. It felt more like a pre-season friendly, and the fact the game’s first two goalscoring chances came from crazy deflections, with David Ospina blasting the ball at Raheem Sterling at one end, then Gaël Clichy hammering a clearance into Danny Welbeck at the other, summarised the strangeness.

Indeed, the pattern was the entire opposite of what you expect from a top-level match which, usually, lack structure in the opening minutes and then settle down into something more organised. Here, instead, there was an obvious structure to the opening, before everything became scrappy and disjointed.

In the first few minutes, the game was based around Manchester City trying to get their wide players in behind Arsenal’s defence. Managers are increasingly trying to exploit the space between opposition full-backs and centre-backs – indeed, minimising these gaps was crucial to Leicester’s resurgence last season, has played a part in Chelsea switching system this season, and is why Pep Guardiola has occasionally asked his full-backs to drift into narrow midfield positions rather than head towards the opposition corner flags.

Arsenal, however, are often guilty of leaving huge gaps in those areas after losing possession and Guardiola’s attacking gameplan tried to exploit this. Sure enough, within three minutes Sterling breached Arsenal’s defence to sprint on to Fernandinho’s precise through-ball, which prompted Ospina’s aforementioned sweeping, before City opened the scoring with Leroy Sané, the winger on the opposite flank, rounding Ospina after his similar run was found by Kevin De Bruyne’s outrageous first-time volleyed pass.

City dominated the first 25 minutes, with De Bruyne controlling the game in his deep midfield role. Arsenal were overrun in that zone, with their duo of Francis Coquelin and Granit Xhaka making poor decisions in possession, and also somewhat typically getting themselves booked for reckless tackles. City hit the woodwork twice through De Bruyne.

Leroy Sané scores after getting on the end of De Bruyne’s outrageous pass. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images

Gradually, however, Arsenal worked themselves into the game, and started making inroads down their left flank. Here, Guardiola had surprisingly decided to deploy winger Jesús Navas at right-back, a position he appeared entirely unsuited to. The Spaniard had clumsily fouled Danny Welbeck having got himself into a curious position in the first five minutes, before he was booked for a an extremely poor tackle on Nacho Monreal. He was up against Alexis Sánchez, among the Premier League’s trickiest forwards, and wasn’t helped by Sterling’s tendency to let Monreal fly forward unmarked on the overlap. Arsenal twice had dangerous moments in the box that prompted excellent challenges from the outstanding Fernandinho. Arsenal’s equaliser, through Theo Walcott, came after a good spell of pressure, but then they allowed Sergio Agüero to smash in City’s second after their backline appeared strangely unprotected.

It seemed obvious Guardiola would take off the beleaguered Navas at half-time, with Fernandinho going to right-back and Yaya Touré introduced to play in midfield. Sure enough, Touré appeared – but it was for Sterling, with De Bruyne moving right and Touré beefing up the midfield. That owed both to Sterling’s poor tracking and Guardiola’s determination to increase City’s ball retention quality, but meant City had less attacking threat in behind. Meanwhile, Shkodran Mustafi nodded in Arsenal’s equaliser from a corner, which seemingly set up a brilliant final 35 minutes.

Instead, both sides seemingly settled for the draw and the match petered out disappointingly. Eventually, Guardiola moved Navas from right-back, introducing a conventional defender in Pablo Zabaleta, who replaced David Silva, but only in the 89th minute. It was a strange substitution to make by this point, but then again it was a fitting ending to a very strange game.