Cheer up Arsenal fans, it’s nearly Christmas and your team’s actually pretty good y’know.
We’ve come up with five reasons for you miseries to be merry in this festive season.
Six points off the top
We understand the frustration. It was supposed to be Arsenal’s turn. Manchester City have crumbled and rather than the Gunners taking advantage having been on the heels of the champions for much of the last two seasons, it’s instead Liverpool who have reaped the rewards of Pep Guardiola losing his mind.
Chelsea have provided the sh*t sprinkles on the sorrow sundae as a formerly basket-case football club that finished 26 points behind Arsenal last season and 40 the season before and are now a remarkably serious outfit that looks well set to dominate the Premier League for years to come even if their challenge falls away this season. The fear is that, because of Chelsea in particular, Mikel Arteta and Arsenal are right now missing their best chance of winning the title.
But chinks have appeared in Liverpool’s armour having not won a Premier League game since the start of December, Arsenal can cut their lead to three points if they beat Crystal Palace on Saturday and there’s a helluva long way to go in a season where the Gunners have already dealt pretty well with an injury to one of their two best players. What happens to Liverpool if they lose Mohamed Salah? Or Chelsea if Cole Palmer’s ruled out?
A nice run of fixtures
Arsenal’s next four Premier League fixtures are Crystal Palace (A), Ipswich (A), Brentford (A) and Brighton (A), all perfectly winnable games, though the clash at Brentford is obviously a sizeable challenge given their ludicrous form at the Gtech.
They’ve also sit third in the Champions League table so Mikel Arteta can field weakened sides against Dinamo Zagreb and Girona, who aren’t likely to provide too much of an issue for a second string XI in any case, allowing key players a rest towards the end of January when they face what we assume will be sterner Premier League tests against Tottenham and Aston Villa ahead of a trip to the Etihad at the start of February.
Odegaard and Saka
The absurd #ArtetaOut brigade continue to come up with new sticks to beat their manager with, and his reliance on Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka is very much in vogue right now.
The drop-off without them is massive to be fair, but they need only look at a Rodri-less Manchester City in search of perspective. It’s unreasonable given the current state of football finances for a club to have players anywhere near the level of Odegaard or Saka watching from the sidelines, and even if they had the wherewithal there’s no chance footballers that good would be satisfied with bit part roles when they could be starting for pretty much any other team in Europe.
Because Odegaard and Saka are that good. Arsenal have got the best playmaker in the Premier League and the second-best winger after Mohamed Salah. It would be weird if them being out didn’t make the team significantly worse, and weirder that so much time is spent worrying about how their absence affects Arsenal rather than being incredibly happy that they play for the club.
Set pieces
The mural of club legend Nicolas Jover indicates there’s a certain amount of leaning into their reliance on set pieces, as do the noises of anticipation at the Emirates when the ball goes out for a corner, but a criticism from rival fans that can be batted away when Arsenal are winning becomes grating when they fail to do so.
But it’s important to make the distinction between being good at set pieces and not being good in open play. Having corners and free-kicks as such formidable weapons will never be a bad thing, unless Arsenal reach the point where they’re turning down opportunities to score from open play in a bid to win a corner, which we would love to see but is pretty unlikely to happen.
We’re not sure there’s ever been a Premier League team so good at attacking corners. Jover deserves some credit, sure, but it’s the accurate deliveries of Declan Rice and Saka that are most extraordinary. How many times have Arsenal fans, or any group of fans for that matter, complained about a corner taker failing to clear the first man in the past? The regularity with which they’re able to swing the ball in on top of the goalkeeper is incredible.
Tottenham are a joke
While we’re on the topic of Arsenal’s so-called agricultural new style of football, please don’t tell us you would rather be Tottenham?
“Are you not entertained?” Ange Postecoglou asked a reporter on Thursday evening, staying true to the It’s Who We Are Mate bit despite prowling his technical area for the last 30 minutes against Manchester United looking as though he wanted to rip several of his players limb from limb.
We wonder whether he’s confusing entertaining the Spurs fans with putting them in a perpetual state of unbearable anxiety and the good news for Gunners is that as long as Big Ange remains the Mad As A Bottle Of Tw*ts approach to football games will continue ad infinitum, granting Spurs supporters glorious but brief highs like hits of ecstasy on a Saturday nights peppered through the comedown of normal life.