Arsenal have secured Champions League football and pretty much put to bed any thoughts of a ‘third in a two-horse race’ situation with a hard-fought 1-0 win over Newcastle, for whom a nervy final day of the season awaits.
1. With this tight and tense win over Newcastle, Arsenal have confirmed their place in next season’s Champions League and effectively confirmed second place with a six-point lead plus significant goal-difference advantage over Man City, now the only team that can catch them.
No matter what City do, even a point for Arsenal next weekend against heroically and historically bad Southampton will be enough to secure that second-place finish.
Easy, and fun, to mock Arsenal for finishing second again. But while their matchwinner today Declan Rice admitted immediately afterwards that they are disappointed with their league form this season, they do deserve plenty of praise for the way they’ve avoided the possible slapstick pratfalls that the universe had left out for them in the wake of the defeat to PSG that ended their hopes of the sort of shiny, tangible success that has become patience-testingly overdue.
With teams snapping at their heels and games against Liverpool and Newcastle to follow the crushing disappointment of that Champions League exit, it was all too easy to imagine Arsenal stumbling into an undignified squabble just to get back into the Big Cup next year. Instead
2. Yet in the second half at Liverpool and the second half today they have shown the quality and resilience to indicate they are not going anywhere. Four points from these two games is a fine effort given the circumstances and says plenty about this team. They will be back next season, and they will be challenging again.
We’ve already nailed our colours to the Arsenal mast for 25/26 and are choosing to take their efforts over the last two weekends as extremely significant and encouraging. We will be accepting no ‘Oh, they’ve just turned it on once it no longer mattered’ criticisms at this time. This mattered. The chance of a really ugly end to the season was significantly higher than zero 10 days ago.
3. This was not a faultless performance, though. Arsenal were sluggish and second-best for much of the first half, and indebted to David Raya’s five saves in the first 20 minutes for keeping the game goalless.
With Matz Sels unable to keep a clean sheet at West Ham earlier in the day, it’s now level-pegging for the Golden Glove going into the final day.
4. As at Liverpool last weekend, Arsenal were able to shift the mood and direction of the game at the start of the second half. It’s another big tick for Mikel Arteta, and the nature of the goal Arsenal scored will have delighted him. Anthony Gordon was swarmed and harried into a mistake. Bukayo Saka pounced upon it, worked himself some space and played in Martin Odegaard.
Unlike much of his work this season and even much of his other work today, Odegaard was quick and decisive in getting the ball across the edge of the box where Declan Rice had timed his run superbly to arrive and sweep home in the kind of Lampard-esque fashion of which he has long been capable and which he himself admits we should see more often.
5. Of course, while Rice’s goal had all the hallmarks of Frank Lampard in his pomp, that was not the comparison Peter Drury leapt for on commentary. It is already very clear that any goal Rice scores for the remainder of his career will be compared and contrasted with the free-kicks he scored against Real Madrid, even when the similarity extends quite literally no further than the identity of the goalscorer and the end of the Emirates Stadium at which he scored them.
Still, at least it allowed us all to move on from Drury’s previous standout contribution to the proceedings when he noted during one of Newcastle’s frequent if not always incisive first-half attacks that ‘Barnes can penetrate himself here’. Don’t be blue, Peter.
6. You didn’t need to look too hard to spot the afternoon’s most obvious narrative as perennially strikerless Arsenal took on a Newcastle side without Alexander Isak.
And it turns out a Newcastle side without Isak can look… an awful lot like Arsenal at their bluntest and most frustrating.
Especially in the first half, Newcastle produced waves of promising and enterprising attacks that came up short at the final moment.
Callum Wilson is no fool, but he simply isn’t Isak and could never hope to be. It wasn’t just the Swede’s finishing that Newcastle missed, but his touch and guile around the edge of the opposition area.
7. Nobody doubts Isak’s quality, of course, but it remains undeniable that players never look better than when they’re out of the team. Newcastle without their focal point didn’t become a bad side, but the difference was dramatic nonetheless.
And while Newcastle got a glimpse of what an Isak-less future might look like, Arsenal were reminded of what might have been. Kai Havertz was back in the squad for the first time since February, greeted with huge applause when he got up for a warm-up and even bigger cheers when getting back on the pitch in the final stages.
His contribution and significance to Arsenal over the last couple of seasons has been a subject of intense debate and discussion since he made the move across London from Chelsea, but it’s clear how much Arsenal have missed him and how pleased they were to have him back.
He may never be the solution to their need for a Proper Striker but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a key player as Arsenal prepare for another go at the title next season.
8. And while the ‘Arsenal need a striker’ narrative has rarely been a tricky one to delve into this season, even before their injury crisis, there’s something particularly telling about this latest instalment with Newcastle as the opposition.
This was the fourth time Arsenal have played the Magpies this season, and the first time they’ve avoided defeat having gone down in the league before Christmas and in both legs of the Carabao Cup semi-final after Christmas.
Rice’s goal today was Arsenal’s first against them this season, from their 52nd shot.
9. Similarly, Isak’s rare absences have been keenly felt by Newcastle. This was the fourth Premier League game he’s missed this season. Those four games have now brought Newcastle just two points, with their only goal across those games an Anthony Gordon penalty against Man City.
Put more starkly: Newcastle have failed to score in just two of their 33 Premier League games featuring Isak, and in three of the four he’s missed.
10. You do find yourself wondering whether things might still have worked out the way they did for Newcastle in their three previous games against the Gunners this season had Isak been available.
In all those games Newcastle controlled the game out of possession, creating the clearer chances and keeping Arsenal comfortably at arm’s length despite only having around 35 per cent of the ball. The first 30 minutes of this one felt remarkably similar, just without that important element of goals thanks to Newcastle’s lack of precision with the finishing and Raya’s excellence, most notably when keeping out a Dan Burn header from a corner.
11. Arsenal themselves gained a foothold in the game from a flurry of corners after that difficult first half-hour. Nick Pope had saved well from an early Arsenal corner, using the leaping Peter Schmeichel starfish technique to keep out Thomas Partey’s close-range header.
Arsenal’s flurry of corners later in the half were quite cleverly handled by Newcastle, who made no attempt to track the run of whoever offered Bukayo Saka the option of a short corner. This was shrewd from Newcastle, because it convinced Arsenal to go short more than once from those corners, and they never looked remotely as threatening as when they were firing the ball into the crowded six-yard box.
12. While Arsenal’s Champions League spot is now secure, and the possibility of any ‘third in a two-horse race’ shenanigans now so remote that they may well dodge it even if they did find a way to lose to Southampton on the final day, Newcastle’s position among that top five is suddenly just ever so slightly shakier than it was a few days ago.
Villa and Chelsea collecting wins over the entirely distracted and wilfully sh*t pair of jokers that are Spurs and Man United will have surprised nobody, but Newcastle could have been forgiven for hoping Nottingham Forest might drop points at West Ham earlier this afternoon.
Sure, West Ham are also quite sh*t currently, but they are at least less distracted than the two teams who squat directly below them in the table.
13. Forest’s win in that one coupled with Newcastle’s defeat here has bunched things up considerably. Depending on what City come up with against Bournemouth on Tuesday – and frankly who knows what that might be after the disappointment of the FA Cup final at Wembley and some other less tha convincing performances in recent weeks – we might well have third to seventh place separated by a single point going into the final day.
We may not have had a title race, and we may not have had a relegation fight, but this scramble for the European places has certainly delivered something to keep us all going on the run-in. Especially with those wins this weekend for both Palace and Forest creating the very real prospect of a trophyless Man City slumming it in the Conference next season.
14. Isak’s absence here also confirms there will be no late twist in the Golden Boot fight, with Mo Salah remaining five clear. Again, we have to find our final-day angles where we can get them, and for the individual gongs and baubles that now means Raya v Sels for the Golden Glove. It’s always been the big one in our eyes.
15. Arsenal’s injury problems this season have certainly created opportunities this season, and while he might not be the most eye-catching grabber of such a chance Jakub Kiwior has certainly stepped up since Gabriel Magalhaes was ruled out.
He was seriously impressive again today, outperforming William Saliba in the first half and Riccardo Calafiori in the second.
No Arsenal player made more tackles (4), interceptions (2), clearances (10) or blocks (2) than a centre-back whose Arsenal career appeared all but over just a couple of months ago.
He may still be on his way out, but his late-season form will have given Arsenal pause while also improving his prospects for landing on his feet somewhere else.
16. Kiwior did, though, get himself involved in some daftness in the closing stages. With the five indicated added minutes having long since elapsed and play basketballing unnervingly from end to end, Newcastle came up short with one final attack that prompted Scenes Nobody Likes To See But That Actually Everyone Likes To See. Kiwior and Newcastle’s Burn were booked for their part in a textbook melee, with the final whistle delayed in vaguely shambolic fashion while VAR had a look to see if anybody was in need of more serious punishment.
On the back of the interminable wait for Nottingham Forest’s second goal to be confirmed earlier, a delay that almost caused that game to run on beyond the kick-off time for this one, it was another day where there wasn’t necessarily any errors from VAR but still a frustratingly unnecessary tendency to place itself front and centre of the action when there was no real need for it to do so.
In many ways these are the kinds of incidents, the small and twatty rather than large and game-changing, that most grind our gears with VAR. It’s this kind of heavyhanded and unnecessary use of it that most has us questioning whether VAR is truly here to serve the game or whether we become ever closer to tipping that balance the other way.