Two weeks ago Mikel Arteta promised his Arsenal players would chase relentlessly until they were mathematically out of contention for the Premier League title. “I’m not going to stop, over my dead body,” he said.
At Old Trafford on Sunday, his players again failed to live up to his billing. Against the notoriously fragile Manchester United, whose injury list made Arsenal’s much-lamented absences pale into insignificance, Arteta’s team played as though they had already given up on the league.
The quality of their performance can be gauged from the fact that goalkeeper David Raya was their outstanding player, despite gifting United the lead just before half-time by standing far over to the right of his goal, inviting Bruno Fernandes to shoot to his left. Fernandes obliged with a driven free kick that crossed the line fully a metre inside the post and a metre under the crossbar.
Despite the less-than-optimal placement, Raya got nowhere near it. Sky gamely tried to whip up a post-match controversy over the fact that referee Anthony Taylor had marched Arsenal’s wall 11.2 yards back from the position of the ball rather than the regulation 10. It feels unlikely that 1.2-Yardgate will have displaced “I’ll see you out there” in the broadcasters’ nostalgia reels 20 years hence.
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No Premier League fixture is more soaked in nostalgia and no Premier League fixture is more embarrassed by comparison with the past. The first half resembled a last-day-of-the-season kickabout between two mid-table sides. Nobody expects much more from United at this point, but was this really the best Arsenal could do? By the time Fernandes stepped up to take that free-kick, the whole occasion had started to feel like a colossal waste of everyone’s time.
Surprisingly, Arteta claimed after the game that he had been impressed by his team’s performance in that first half. “You are so good in the first half, you do so many good things and then you are 1-0 down, mentally it’s painful,” he said. What good things did he have in mind? Arsène Wenger had a phrase for what Arsenal had achieved in that first half: sterile domination.
A spate of midseason injuries in the attacking positions knocked out Arsenal’s teeth but the warning signs had been there even before. The frustration of successive second-place finishes seemed to convince Arteta that a more ruthless, powerful, uncompromising approach was necessary, but something was sacrificed in this transformation. There has been a heaviness about them this season, as though they are concentrating too furiously to be spontaneous or creative. The focus on set pieces and associated gamesmanship suggests a fixation on marginal gains, an obsession with organisation that has stifled the element of self-expression.
This season will probably make it three runners-up finishes in a row, making Arsenal the first club ever to achieve that feat on two separate occasions.
Their first hat-trick of second-places came between 1999 and 2001, but Wenger’s side had already won a Double before commencing that run. The players and fans were sustained through successive disappointments by the knowledge that they were led by a manager who had already proven he could win it.
Arteta knows that a season of regression will fuel the growing faction of doubters. This campaign has been hit hard by injuries and red cards, but Arsenal’s own decisions have also had something to do with it. The coach irritably walked away from a TV interview after being asked if he wished Arsenal had signed a striker – “it’s not about that”. But the fact is that Liverpool are likely to win the title because Mohamed Salah has scored as many league goals as Kai Havertz, Bukayo Saka, Leandro Trossard, Gabriel Martinelli and Gabriel Jesus combined.
Arsenal clearly need to add attackers, but where, and of what type? Will Martinelli ever become the player they hoped he would back in 2022-23, when he scored 15 in the league? Does Arteta accept that his expensive gamble on Havertz turning into a title-winning false nine has failed, or does he give it one more season hoping to be proved right?
For both Arsenal and United what remains of the season is now all about Europe. United face the prospect of having to replace most of their squad to fit Ruben Amorim’s system, which would be daunting enough even if their bank account wasn’t empty. This is why a player as promising as Kobbie Mainoo is being fattened for sale.
But if they can beat Real Sociedad on Thursday they move to within five matches of the Europa League title, which represents a backdoor Champions League qualification that could transform their short-term financial outlook.
United fans had held another protest outside the ground before kick-off. These fans have been protesting against the Glazer ownership for 20 years and the main thing that has changed is now another billionaire has come in to add his own mistakes to the mix.
The situation looks grim but as Amorim insisted after Sunday’s game, “this club will never die”, and where there is life, there is hope. Fabio Capello did an interview with the Spanish paper El Mundo last week and at one point happily reminisced about how, in 1996, his Real Madrid team had been able to sign Roberto Carlos from Inter for a knock-down price (then-Inter manager Roy Hodgson didn’t rate the Brazilian). “Football is always full of opportunities,” Capello said, “because it’s full of people who don’t understand it.”
Unfortunately for United, some of those people are running their club, but maybe they’ll run into some like-minded individuals in the summer market.
