The title race was always on …

Morning all.

So, the 9 point lead at the top became 6 when Man City beat Liverpool at Anfield yesterday. I didn’t watch it live, and I’ve caught up on the highlights via Match of the Day this morning, but my phone was buzzing like mad when I was out and about yesterday afternoon.

I guess when Dominic Szoboszlai scores a free kick like that in the 74th minute, your hopes that City would drop points are increased. But, as I’ve said often, football is a strange beast at times, and the final stages of this game were a bit mental. City equalised, then got a penalty after Alisson’s misjudgement, there was a red card for Szoboszlai, and a lot of added time for that sending off and a disallowed goal.

I guess from a City perspective, this is the kind of shot in the arm they’d have been looking for going into this game. Sometimes it’s not just the fact you win, but how you win that has an impact. Or at least it feels that way. To find a way so late in the game to beat Liverpool at Anfield, it could be just the thing to restore belief and confidence. The flip side is that it looks, statistically anyway, to have been a fairly even game, they needed a mistake from Liverpool, and an unbelievable save from Gianluigi Donnarumma to win it. Not to mention they were quite lucky, in my opinion, that Liverpool missed good chances to score, and that Marc Guehi only saw yellow for what could easily have been a red card with the score at 0-0.

I think we all remember how we felt when Reiss Nelson scored against Bournemouth. There was a sense that it was meant to be by virtue of how dramatic it was, but in the end that wasn’t the case. This might be City’s shot in the arm, it might be their Bournemouth moment, and hopefully it’s just the latter.

Some will say the title race is back on, but so much of that is just narrative. Even if City had dropped points yesterday, anyone who thinks a 7 or 9 point lead is insurmountable with so many game still to go is fooling themselves, in my opinion. The title race was always on, it just makes for better headlines and more dramatic copy to present it as ‘over’ after we beat Sunderland then ‘back on’ when City win yesterday. It’s a ‘boost’ for City and a ‘hammer blow’ for Arsenal, according to Roy Keane on Sky Sports. Pffff.

I guarantee you that the Arsenal players and this manager are absolutely conditioned to this kind of eventuality. Like any normal person, they’d have been hopeful City would falter, but there’s not a chance they’re now bereft and psychologically damaged by the late madness. They’ve seen it before, they’ve experienced it before, and I’d almost bet part of the conversations they had around this weekend were about City cutting the gap.

I refer back to what Mikel Arteta said on Saturday about what the then 9 point lead meant:

Nothing. we still have to win so many games to achieve what we want. So, there’s no focus on that, that’s something else. We’ve done our job now, we’ve had what we have to do, so I assess that, try to improve it and get ready for Brentford.

City play again on Wednesday, taking on Fulham at home in a game they’ll probably win quite comfortably. That would cut the gap to 3 points. Will that be a double-hammer blow for Arsenal, or simply the vagaries of a title race involving two very good sides? As Arteta often says, Arsenal need to focus on the things they can control, not those they can’t. Which means Brentford away on Thursday, a really tricky game against a good side in decent form.

We can’t do anything about what City do, what Liverpool do against City, or anything else involving them. So, while it’s natural to be a bit disappointed about yesterday, there is a tendency sometimes to over-index those things. Would it have made our lives easier if that game had finished 1-0 or even 1-1? Of course, but there’s no world in which winning the Premier League is easy, and that’s the reality we have to face. The only way to respond to what they do is to do our job properly when we play, and I suspect that will be the message from the manager to his players this week.

Right, I’m gonna leave it there. We will have an Arsecast Extra for you later, but we’re not recording until about midday, so it’ll be a bit later than usual. Keep an eye out for the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com. So fire away using the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server. The pod should be mid-afternoon.

For now, have a good one.

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