Arsenal minds are fraying and unravelling; competing with Man City might be bad for your health
We are worried about Arsenal fans. It seems to be getting all too much for them.
One of the things we were most interested to discover this season was whether Mikel Arteta and his enormously impressive team could go again and give Manchester City a proper season-long fight for a third time in a row. It always seemed to us that this – whether it ended in success or not – would represent a pretty significant achievement for the Gunners.
The very best side Jurgen Klopp built at Liverpool couldn’t do it. Sure, they managed to get a title along the way, but they could never challenge City three times in a row. And it’s easy to see why. It’s absolutely exhausting, physically and mentally, to go up against a machine as relentless as Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City with their assorted advantages baked in and sprinkled on top.
What we hadn’t perhaps fully considered is the impact it must have on supporters. Now all clubs have a section of fans who see bias and conspiracy at every turn, but let’s gently suggest Arsenal fans have, collectively, been more predisposed to seeing such things than others. We’re trying to be delicate here. And it’s Not All Arsenal Fans.
But it really does seem like it might now be A Lot More Arsenal Fans. There is something specifically challenging about trying to fight Manchester City for titles. First and most obviously, Manchester City are a truly excellent football team with a truly excellent manager.
And there’s no denying that how City’s current pre-eminence came to be is an added factor. There is clear frustration from the previous elite at the way City fought their way into their cosy club. Liverpool, Man United and Arsenal fans might not like the other members of the so-called Red Cartel (a term which itself represents a worrying turn towards the conspiratorial from City fans) but they see themselves reflected in those clubs.
Arsenal fans might not care for Liverpool, but they have no philosophical objection to the sight of Liverpool in a title race. Or – even though this is now a merely theoretical construct – Manchester United. They are teams who they consider to have earned their right to such status in the right way, like they did.
MORE ARSENAL COVERAGE ON F365…
👉 Arsenal will ‘bottle it again’ with ‘pragmatist’ Arteta ‘missing’ final puzzle piece; Saliba ‘incredibly dumb’
👉 Are Arsenal a ‘team of monsters’? But it was a great weekend for VAR…
👉 Arsenal legend rues ‘massive moment’ as ‘overthinking’ Gunner must ‘improve’ one aspect of his game
City, and to a lesser extent before them Chelsea, can never be part of that gang and it’s not really because their shirts are blue. They represent ghastly nouveau riche who don’t know how to behave in civilised society.
And while we still think Arsenal will mount a title challenge this year, we’re increasingly concerned about the effect of it all on their fans. We’ve had similar thoughts at a lower level about Spurs fans. About how a good chunk of them now seem quite willing to try and turn the clock back to pre-Big Six days and just enjoy Angeball in all its daftness and not have to worry and stress about how every individual result affects their top-four chances.
We do just wonder whether something similar isn’t happening at Arsenal. It’s the fundamental problem of getting yourself in a fight with a City side that has set 90 points as the absolute bare minimum benchmark. It makes the importance of every dropped point absurdly outsized.
Drop two at home to Brighton and you’ve got the beginnings of a crisis. Lose at Bournemouth and it’s a season-wrecking disaster. The margins are non-existent, every single game a tightrope walk with no safety net.
It’s no wonder it’s exhausting, and no wonder it frays nerves and senses.
But Arsenal fans – and we know we’re generalising here – really do need to regain the run of themselves. They have got to stop seeing things that aren’t there.
Their new hero is Gary O’Neil. Now he was quite understandably gutted about Manchester City scoring an injury-time winner after his struggling Wolves side put in a monumental shift and came so tantalisingly close to taking what would have been one of the most hard-earned points the Barclays has ever seen.
However, the fact City’s winner was desperately cruel is not in itself reason enough for it to be chalked off. One wouldn’t expect O’Neil to be able to consider that moment calmly in the immediate aftermath, and he wasn’t alone. In the desperate and unending quest for controversy, Sky’s commentators didn’t notice the goal had actually initially been disallowed and was overturned on VAR review, while the entire Sky studio team – including three vastly experienced former Premier League footballers – all collectively forgot how the offside law works from corners.
Once everyone had calmed down and realised Bernardo Silva wasn’t actually in an offside position until John Stones heads the ball, by which time Silva is nowhere near the scene of the ‘crime’, it is abundantly clear that the goal has to stand. It was very clever from Silva, really. It is in fact, exactly the sort of set-piece cleverness of which Arsenal themselves are so rightly proud.
O’Neil spoke darkly afterwards about ‘unconscious bias’ and referees subconsciously feeling happier to upset the little guys than the big guys where City are involved.
Arsenal fans leapt gleefully upon this and have found themselves a new hero. But the cognitive dissonance here is off the charts. Arsenal have now had costly red cards against Brighton and Bournemouth. Who is the little guy here?
We will acknowledge that this was a weekend apparently designed by Satan himself to wind up and infuriate Arsenal fans. It started with a big win for Spurs and went swiftly downhill from there.
Any defeat for Arsenal is now a catastrophe because of the rarefied air they now breathe, but follow that up with a Sunday full of contentious and controversial incidents that all end up with the correct decision being reached in the end is a recipe for frustration and p*ss-boiling that could leave even the most clear-headed Gunner starting to lose the run of things.
Tosin’s yellow card against Liverpool had enough superficial, surface-level similarities to William Saliba’s red that it was a straightforward task for the conspiratorially inclined to go off the deep end. As long as you used only still photos and entirely ignored the relative speeds and directions of travel of all the other players involved, it was easy to paint a deceptive yet compelling picture.
Throw in all those penalty decisions, and Liverpool-Chelsea ended up being a game that looked far more controversial than it actually was. On the top of Man City being awarded a goal that also fits that description and the Arsenal powderkeg was always going to blow.
It’s absolutely fine to be frustrated and angry after such a disappointing weekend. We have quite literally all been there.
But Arsenal fans, we beg you, please do all you can to resist the conspiracy theory Kool-Aid. It might make you feel a tiny bit better in the short term to imagine it’s all the unseen hand of the PGMOL and the Premier League and the FA conspiring against you for some reason, but in the long term it cannot end anywhere good or healthy,
It really should not need saying that there is no bias or conspiracy against Arsenal. That every single major decision this weekend had a perfectly rational and far more likely explanation than everyone being out to get Arsenal.
It is all in your heads. But then we would say that, wouldn’t we?