TITLE FINISHED.
Nothing quite impacts me more deeply than Arsenal doing poorly, and right now, I feel deeply wounded. Our title race didn’t crash in glorious failure on the battlefield—jumping over trenches and cutting throats in face-to-face combat—it ended in the munitions tent, with a grenade accidentally unpinned and tucked into our pocket. The obituary will indeed state that we were at war with Liverpool, but the details of our demise will recount a sorry summer, exhaustion, and a moment when we froze up while the world’s eyes were expecting something very different.
West Ham should not have been allowed to do what they did to Arsenal yesterday. Graham Potter is too early in his West Ham career for that sort of nonsense. He did what Ruben Amorin can’t—he adapted his squad to the situation and caused Arsenal a lot of pain centrally with a dirty deepblock.
At home, we should have found a way. But on an afternoon when we registered over 20 shots, I can barely recall a single good chance worth writing about.
Martin Ødegaard just doesn’t have the magic this season in the final third. We look to him to deliver Ozil-like brilliance on the regular, but his value to the team now seems to be less about what he does on the ball and more about what he does off it. His season has been so bland that he isn’t even in the top 35 in the league for big chances created.
Our forward line is broken and bruised, and the magic of Merino that I pumped all week simply didn’t show up. My biggest L since saying Eddie Nketiah could be better than Romario. Arsenal’s performance was so useless that, at one point in the second half, a single tear rolled down my cheek like that of a character who’d just discovered they’d been betrayed in a cheap Netflix soap opera. I say “cheap” because Merino as an attacking solution is not befitting a club that should have blockbuster striking options. Gabriel Jesus is not a 9, and Kai Havertz is not a 9. Unfortunately, Mikel Merino is barely a left-sided 8 in this system.
Even the goal we conceded was like a wet halibut to the face of a summer that lacked focus. Why was Calafiori—despite all his injuries and lack of pace—chosen as the player on whom we spent our finite resources last summer? He once again looked like a centre-back asked to play out of position, and once again, he was shown up for his pace, which played a role in the goal that sealed our fate. We should have listened to the Basel manager who said Calafiori was too slow to be a fullback in the Swiss league.
Our midfield was dreadful; Declan Rice was simply not up to par with his passing range, positioning, or sharpness in the final third. He was so bad that Arteta pulled him off before 60 minutes.
The icing on the cake of all our bets failing on a torrid day at the races was MLS getting sent off for a clear red, Ethan Nwaneri hobbling off injured, and then having to chase the game with a panic loan signing that prevented Arsenal from securing a loan deal from the Premier League in January.
Just pitiful.
Loan watch didn’t look too good for Arsenal. It’s always easy to point to the things that went right for other teams that were bold. But if I can sit out here and laugh at Man City spending £260m and getting beaten again, then I have to have the decency to look at Aston Villa who saw two goals scored by loanee Asensio, and assisted by loanee Marcus Rashford. Two players famed for being lazy doing enough to put an important victory the way of a team competing for the top 4 is red meat to the transfer tweakers, especially now as the concern is we’re going to drop into the pack of top 4 chasers with Liverpool racing away from Arsenal.
I prefer to view the West Ham game as an in-house problem. Screaming about what you could have purchased is, frankly, not what went wrong. That was a shit performance across the board. We didn’t give our attack a chance to win the game because our defending was poor. Our midfield lacked intensity and focus, and our attackers weren’t put into good positions or given opportunities to shine. The team Arteta fielded was capable of taking down West Ham, and the uncomfortable question we now face is this: What is it with Arsenal dropping out of title races to inferior teams?
Arteta had a whole week to have that team banging down the gates to get onto the field. They arrived as if they were playing an Emirates Cup game. There was no fire; the duels were not being won; they looked shocked to be playing against a deep block, and there was no urgency or intensity.
How can a team that was watching Liverpool have a mini-unraveling going into a game with that sort of mindset? What the f*ck were they doing at training?
It beggars belief. We were on a really impressive run. We’d escaped the crunch of games. It was time to go toe-to-toe and at least give the fans more than three days of hope that we could form a legitimate title race and make them proud. Instead, we’re all looking at a largely joyless season of ifs, buts, and maybes—mostly because Arsenal went into the season unprepared for battle after letting last summer slip away from them.
At least Arteta owned it.
I refuse that completely because I am talking about the standards of the players and the team that we played today, me included 100%, were nowhere near the levels that we have to hit to have the opportunity to win a Premier League game today. We were very consistent, yes, but football is about what you do today and today, it was nowhere near.
I don’t have much in the tank today to explore what’s next. I’m having a down day. I’ll have a serious think about how things have panned out, and then I’ll come back to the table with some thoughts tomorrow.
Have a nice day—I’m off to sit in a corner and cry some more. I might crack open a beer, but I’m worried about how the hangover will make me feel tomorrow. I hate this. I really hate this. x