Arsenal beat Brighton 2-1 at the Emirates on Tuesday night. The headlines will be the set piece that broke a match open in the sixty seventh minute and the counter attack that settled it in the eighty ninth. The more useful story, if you are fourteen and trying to learn the game, is everywhere else.

Here are three things to take away from ninety minutes that are more instructive than the final score.

1. The pressing trigger starts with the striker's first touch, not his run

Brighton's shape out of possession asks a lot of their number nine. He does not chase the ball carrier. He waits. The signal he is watching for is the first touch of whichever Arsenal centre back takes possession. If Saliba's first touch goes towards the touchline, Brighton press. If it goes back towards the goalkeeper, they hold shape and reset their block.

If you watch only the runners, you will miss why the press works when it works and collapses when it does not. In the twenty fourth minute, Arsenal played two quick passes between Saliba and White while Brighton's front three were still arguing about which one of them had read the cue wrongly. Rice received the ball in twenty yards of space, stepped forwards, and the next three minutes belonged to Arsenal.

The lesson: pressing is not about running fast. It is about all the players who have to run fast agreeing on the same moment, and the signal that tells them the moment has started.

2. Saliba's conversation with Lewis-Skelly is the match

Watch a replay of the match on mute. Count the number of times William Saliba turns his head, locates his left back, and either calls him across the pitch or shapes him higher. I counted sixty one times across the ninety minutes. Lewis-Skelly moved, on average, within two seconds of every instruction.

The defenders who get to play in sides like this one are not necessarily the quickest or the strongest. They are the ones who do what the senior centre back in front of them asks, the first time, without needing it explained twice. Saliba was not a finished player at eighteen. He was a player who listened. If you are a centre back, a full back, or a defensive midfielder at any level, the single best habit you can build this year is to look at the player you most trust before you look at the ball.

3. The set piece that won it was practised on Monday

Arsenal's opener arrived from a corner. The near post runner pulled two Brighton defenders with him. A second runner came from deep. The ball cleared the first wave and landed on the head of the third runner, who was the only attacking player not already being tracked. This was not inspiration. This was, almost certainly, Monday.

Set piece coaching is what separates teams that finish fourth from teams that finish first. You cannot watch it happen on television because the camera cuts to the goal. You can see it happen on the training pitch in front of you every week, and the coaches who spend fifteen minutes on it at U13 and U14 level are building players who will keep doing it at U17.

If your team does not practise corners and free kicks, ask why. If the answer is that there is not time, make time.

What to take from it

A scoreline is one sentence. A ninety minute match is forty sentences. Arsenal won. That part is easy. The harder part, and the more interesting part, is watching for the small decisions that made the scoreline what it was. Brighton did not lose because their players were worse. They lost because Arsenal's pressing cues were cleaner, their central defender was louder than theirs, and their set piece routine had been drilled one more week than Brighton's had.

Those are the things to copy on Saturday. Not the finishing.