I have aged.
How is this becoming MORE stressful each week?
How on earth are we STILL being put through the wringer?
Honestly, my nerves are shot to pieces. My heart rate has been getting up to cardio-load levels during games. Then, when you have an ending like that yesterday, it goes up a notch even further.
Those last 15 minutes or so (including stoppage time) were the worst/best that I can remember. And when it finished, I was trying to put out social media messages, but my hands were shaking. I was an absolute mess.
But we did it. Somehow, we did it, getting over the line, albeit in somewhat controversial fashion, against a West Ham team fighting for their lives.
I have my family connections to West Ham, so I am not happy that, to all intents and purposes, they are probably going down. And to get what you think could be a vital point in the dying seconds against a team at the top of the Premier League, only to have that taken away, is a gut punch.
But it was a foul. If David Raya doesn’t have an arm across the front of his shoulders, he’s catching that ball that was put into the box. If he isn’t having his shirt pulled behind him, he is catching that ball. And as Trossard said afterwards when interviewed, Raya himself was very calm when the decision was being reviewed. Because he knew it was a foul.
And in that moment, you have to say, it _feels_ like we got some kind of football god-intervention happening for us. Because I’ll be honest, I thought exactly the opposite when Wilson struck that ball. And I wonder what the players would have felt like, too? You’re leading, you know that if you win this tough away game, you are just two victories away from the first league title in 20+ years, and it is taken from you right at the death in stoppage time. It would have been a mental hammer blow (pun intended) that would have given Man City players just as much of a boost as it would have been a blow for our players. The psychological toll that it would have taken could have been huge. The title would have still been in our hands, a big win against Burnley would still put Arsenal in the driving seat to do it on goal difference, but you just feel like City would have used this result as a fuel to go on and absolutely smash Palace in midweek to call the goal difference into question, too.
And now, with Arsenal having got over the line, the pressure for City is massively ratcheted up. They know they basically have to beat Palace, AND beat Bournemouth in the middle of next week. It isn’t done, we still have to win against Burnley and Palace, and despite what anyone says, those two teams are still Premier League sides with decent players, but the momentum has swung back with The Arsenal, and that is huge.
It has come at a cost, though. The Ben White injury is such a shame. He hobbled off; it was a problem with his knee, and if we see him this season, I will be surprised. It’s compounded all the more by the fact that Jurrien Timber might not play again this season, meaning our young centre-half Mosquera, becomes the _de facto_ fullback for the foreseeable future. He’s an able deputy, but he isn’t as good as White or Timber, and it’s a problem for us when you start to think about the Champions League final, for example.
It’s also a shame because with Ben in position, we absolutely dominated the opening 15-20 minutes of the game. Sky Sports showed some stats saying that we’d had nine attempts on goal in the first 15 or so minutes. Calafiori (also apparently injured – no surprises there, though) was linking well with Trossard, we were getting in behind, we hit the post and bar and had one off the line from Calafiori that could have made the complexion of this game look very different. But the White injury changed everything, because Arteta decided to go a bit _left-of-field_ with his subs for the White injury. I think in the cold light of day, when he re-watches this game, he’ll hold his hands up to say sticking White in at right back just wasn’t the right choice. It meant we not only lost our right back, but the control in the centre of the park, and West Ham found themselves with a little more space. Arteta did, of course, course-correct his decision at halftime, but that second half felt stodgy and disjointed overall anyway. Zubimendi suffered the ignomy of being a sub that was subbed off, but he’d hardly had a blinder of a game, plus Arsenal needed to change it because, from a tactical perspective, it wasn’t working. We weren’t finding space in between the lines for those passing lanes, and Havertz felt like a natural choice because he’s going to stand in between the West Ham defence and midfield, rather than where Zubi stands as a deeper lying midfielder. You feel for the Spaniard, but needs must at a time like that.
And those needs were rewarded by Leandro Trossard, who has – quite handily – decided to find some form in recent weeks. I thought he was good again yesterday; lively, looked good in partnership with Calafiori, and whilst his finish had a touch of fortune about it with the deflection, I think on balance we’d deserved that little bit of luck given the chances we created earlier in the game. We also need to tip our caps to Martin Odegaard, whose introduction in the second half as a sub was massively significant. He gets the assist for the goal, his _Platoon_\-style celebration I particularly enjoyed after it went in, but he was central to a lot of the progressive stuff we did when he came on. At a real crunch point in the season, we needed a captain’s performance from the bench, and I think we got one.
And points, well, we got all three. With 20 minutes to go, I didn’t think that would happen. At 96 minutes, I didn’t think that would happen. But here we are. It’s still in our hands. And we have two more wins needed to achieve something magical.
Amanda and I will be discussing all of that and more on the Same Old Arsenal pod later on this evening at 5.45 pm if you fancy joining us – [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms7-zjeDc-A).