Arsenal are seven points clear at the top of the Premier League table. With a game left to play before the Champions League knockout phase they are guaranteed the most favourable fixture scheduling UEFA can provide. They are garlanded with praise, heralded the “best team in the world” by those who hope to hunt them down.
You could cut the tension with a knife.
Anyone who didn’t see the score line from Saturday’s visit to Nottingham Forest but did see the social media reaction could have been forgiven for thinking that Mikel Arteta’s side had turned a commanding lead into a heavy defeat, had inflicted a string of injuries upon themselves, maybe even taken to the pitch carrying a banner saying “this Premier League lark isn’t for us”. Harness the energy unleashed by frustrated supporters after the 0-0 draw at the City Ground and the dream of clean, free energy for all would be a reality. And yet, the stats tell quite a different story.
Now there is an easy and obvious rejoinder to this. Social media is not a place for moderate, restrained analysis at the best of times and Gabriel Martinelli turning wide from a few yards out was one of them. This is the internet. It’s not real life. And as if that isn’t disproven by a million and one other things, it’s quite clear that the little pocket of the internet marked Arsenal’s is bleeding into real life. Anyone who has been at the Emirates Stadium this season will have sensed a tension that would be shared with the fanbases of few if any other prohibitive title contenders.
It is almost as if a fanbase has been thrust, en masse, into the last few pages of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Just as they had come to terms with the idea that Arsenal might be locked out of title contention for even more than the 21 years they’ve waited since the Invincibles, Arteta has inducted them into the “Church of the Latterday Championship Believers.” And they have been living the agony of the 1988-89 season — when Arsenal had the league, threw it away and won it back in the greatest title denouement England has ever seen — since about Christmas 2022. That’s three seasons left “nakedly exposed when [they] could have remained hard and cynical.”
No wonder it has got a bit cold at the Emirates, where moments of glory fade faster in the face of the crushing fear of disappointment. No one should have been cheering a 2-1 win over Wolves to the rafters, but there is no obligation to celebrate any less when you get a last minute winner in a title race. And yet it barely took a moment after Yerson Mosquera flicked into his own net for the jubilation to turn into recriminations, the sense of a victory that turned into a loss.
Saturday’s visit to the City Ground was neither, but after Manchester City’s defeat earlier in the day it added another point to Arsenal’s lead, one that Villa failed to chip into either. Declan Rice though was caught on camera bemoaning “f—ing shit, every f—ing time.” If the nerves can move from online to offline, why wouldn’t you expect young professionals to allow the same thinking to slip into their headspace?
It’s not even clear what Rice was referring to. What are those games that make up every time? Arsenal have dropped points in seven of 22 league games this season. Five of those occasions have been in matches against last season’s top six. Drawing at home to Liverpool or losing at the death to Aston Villa are disappointing but hardly crises. Probably the two most disappointing results of the season so far have been draws under the lights away to Sunderland and Nottingham Forest. If those are bad results, well then there is no need to be upset.
For his part, Arteta seems to have concluded that he cannot sway the emotions of the fanbase. All he can control is what is going on at London Colney. “I don’t think anybody has more motivation, hunger and desire for us to go all the way and win it,” he said.
“We know the only way to do it is focusing, being very present in the moment and doing everything that we have to do today to be better than tomorrow. That’s it. That’s the only thing that we can control. The rest is just things that don’t add any value to us and can take the focus to the wrong place.”
Bundled into the rest, perhaps we can place any ambitions Arteta might have about swaying the crowd. Since the day he was appointed over six years ago, the Spaniard has gone to great lengths to engage supporters, to turn the remnants of the Highbury Library into Fortress Emirates. It is to his credit that it tends to work in the big games and while tension has been rife in the air when Wolves and Brentford have come to town, the crowd has raised itself for the big games. Arteta will want many things when Manchester United roll into town on Sunday afternoon. He will not want the Emirates Stadium becalmed.
“It is not about calming,” he said of his message to supporters. “It is about continuing to do what we are doing really well and try to evolve every single day to be better. From their side it is to continue doing what they do in the stadium. Create more energy, more positiveness around the games in each section. If we do that and we create that kind of a scenario, we are going to make it more and more difficult to the opponent and that is going to help us to win more games.”
They should expect to keep on winning. Perhaps Pep Guardiola’s labelling Arsenal “the best team in the world” is an attempt at the sort of mind games that Sir Alex Ferguson might have deployed when he and Arsene Wenger were vying for Premier League supremacy. Then again, there’s a reason what he said did not lead news bulletins and (probably) back pages is in itself constructive. Of course that’s what Arsenal are. Did you see what they did to Bayern Munich and Inter?
Arteta brushed off such lofty tags — “we are the team who wants to be perfect” — but Guardiola’s words explain why the title race is viewed as so one-sided by those who don’t have skin in the game. Opta’s projection model gives Arsenal a 93% chance of winning the Premier League title. Bookmakers are a bit less bullish but odds that imply an 85% chance are a pretty ringing endorsement. There’s that fear again. How humiliating might it be to fritter away a lead like that?
All the more so given that the rivals are not what they were. Arteta is not writing off Manchester City but his explanation as to why is probably more indicative than he would like. “You have to go back to the history of that club in the last 10 years and what they are capable of doing,” he said. That’s the thing though. The past decade of City history is defined by Ilkay Gundogan, Kevin De Bruyne, Sergio Aguero. They’re not walking through the dressing room door at the Etihad.
It is all in Arsenal’s hands. Even the injuries that derailed their title challenge have eased for the time being at least. Riccardo Calafiori and Piero Hincapie were back in training on Friday, the only player missing from the first team is 16 year old Max Dowman. There is no injury crisis like last year to hand the league to Liverpool. There is no City of two years ago. There is just Arsenal and the fear of what might go wrong.
As Arteta said, “we know what we are capable of doing to win this Premier League.” His fans do too. That’s where the fear comes from. The same two decades of longing that haunted Hornby are bedeviling a new generation. He put it best, “what else is there that can reasonably be coveted for that long?” Now that it is so close Arsenal could almost reach out and touch it, can you blame anyone who fears it might slip away again.
