Yesterday’s North London derby fixture was a spectacle, offering a blend of drama, mistakes, excellent football, and a plethora of talking points that are unique to this intense rivalry.
5 goals, a goal-keeping howler from Arsenal’s Raya, headers hitting the workwork, and some very dubious passing from both teams saw a fantastic example of the Premier League in all its glory. There are enough reports on the game for me not to have to cover it all again in minute detail, but one thing came up yesterday when I was watching the TV coverage, and it kept coming up after the game and into the evening highlights shows shown on UK TV.
There is constant reference to last year, when Arsenal bottled the league, threw it away, succumbed to superior forces, froze in the headlights, developed PTSD, or just plainly ran in the opposite direction to any sort of challenge. The narrative is boring and, from a journalistic point of view, plain shabby in its reporting. It’s too easy to say Arsenal blew it because of nerves, experience, or anything else that fits that narrative. It’s too easy to report on the failure.
When breaking down what really happened, it is really annoying that so-called pundits never look at the number of players used, the size of squads available, the cost of squads available, or even quite how many minutes each key player played from 31 December until the last day of the season.
Arsenal were punching well above their pay grade when April came into play. The same 12–13 players had played practically every game since December. The media went with the mighty favourites, Manchester City, as their “never seen before” team that would win the Premier League despite the fact that the squad was small and they were competing against a country-sponsored team.
The point of this article is that there is always more to the story than meets the eye. There is always a very fine margin of chance, skill, or whatever you want to call it that changes the outcome. If Spurs Romero hadn’t headed against the post at 1-0 or Gabriel’s backside had played on van de Ven’s disallowed goal, this could have been a different ball game. Arsenal would have had the same narrative as last year rammed down their throats about bottling and blowing up when things got tough. No one would have mentioned that these games are always 50-50. I have seen games where we were genuinely lucky to win and also games where Spurs should have been buried but somehow got a result (4-4 at the Emirates, anyone?).
You see, that’s the point of league run-ins. You need a bit of luck and a lot of resilience, and you also need to grind out results in the last 10 games of the season by hook or by crook.
You won’t see dynamic football every week; even the invincible didn’t do that, but if you listened to the pundits on TV at the moment, they would have you believe they did it every week. Time makes things better than they were at the time. Anyone looking back on the infamous Old Trafford game when Wiltord scored would be wrong in thinking that we dominated the whole game and could have had six on the night. It was a tight game, and with a little bit of luck going the other way, it might have seen us coming unstuck, but that’s football.
As I have said before, the teams with the best squads usually do well in the league. The teams with the biggest squads nearly always do well in the league because it is a war of attrition over skill. Last year, Arsenal had neither and went very close. This year, things are better, and they will probably get even closer. If they win, I am not sure it will be celebrated as David overcoming Goliath, but more like Manchester City slipping up than Arsenal beating them at their own game.