Arsenal were held goalless for 64 minutes against Lille last night before scoring three times in the space of eight minutes to win 3-0 in the Champions League.

Mikel Arteta made a triple change shortly after the breakthrough, bringing on Kai Havertz, Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard, and the game was gone within minutes. Speaking to DAZN afterwards, the Arsenal boss was asked what had changed, and his answer pointed squarely at the quality of his side’s play before those substitutions.

“Well, I think it’s basically one adjustment attacking, one defending, but especially that we had to increase the technical level,” he said. “At this level, the teams are really well organised. We get simple balls away, bad touches, mistimed things. When we delivered the ball into the box, it wasn’t into the right area, so we get caught. And especially when those were in the right transition on the left side.

Aside from winning the Champions League, how can Arteta surpass Arsene Wenger as Arsenal’s greatest manager?

“The moment we started to do that better, we could after counter-press, we could regain the ball. We started to play into the opposition’s box, and when we have chances there and with the quality that we have, obviously we made a real difference there.”

Arsenal played a lot better after Viktor Gyokeres went off

Arteta didn’t name anybody in particular, and “increase the technical level” is the sort of phrase he uses often enough. However, one of the players he took off at the 65-minute mark was Viktor Gyokeres, and it’s not hard to read the rest of that answer as a description of his evening.

Simple balls given away, bad touches, mistimed movement. The Swede didn’t register a single shot on target against Lille, which made it 40 games out of 62 in an Arsenal shirt in which he has failed to hit the target at all — roughly 65% of his appearances for the club.

Arteta was obviously talking about the collective in his post-match reflection. But there’s no ignoring that Arsenal’s attack went up two gears the moment Havertz replaced his £64million striker. The manager essentially rolled off a list of things his side stopped doing wrong once he came off.

Gyokeres hasn’t scored for Arsenal since May 2 and, on this evidence, Sunday’s trip to Nottingham Forest is likely to be watched from the bench.