If you really must lose after a seven-game unbeaten Premier League run that has taken you from the edges of a relegation battle to mid-table comfort and a neck craned upwards towards European places, then it is probably better that you are left with a burning sense of injustice rather than boiling anger at your own ineptitude. Now Arsenal must show us how they can recover as Tuesday night provided a glimpse of what might have been and could yet be again.
Had Arsenal continued to play as sharply and as excellently as they had during the first 45 minutes against Wolves and had David Luiz not been controversially sent off and a penalty awarded, then the Gunners would probably have been staring at a Premier League table with themselves in sixth, a position they have not occupied since the wheels began to fall off in October. Yes, they would have been usurped by two or three teams by the end of this midweek, but there would have still been a sizeable gap to the mid-table mediocrity of Southampton and Crystal Palace. Lingering talk of a Big Six would not have seemed so absurd.
This feels like an opportunity missed and it’s easy to see why Mikel Arteta was so incensed. It must be the hardest part of any manager’s job, to watch your team play excellently – if a little wastefully in front of goal – and then be undone by things far beyond your control, regardless of how you apportion blame between Luiz and the referee for that first red card. The second is all on Bernd Leno.
“We hit the post, hit the bar, the keeper made a couple of great saves. We played exceptionally well, scored one goal and should have scored three or four,” said Arteta, who will undoubtedly be accentuating the positives ahead of a Saturday lunchtime clash with Aston Villa. There was no such positive talk when Arsenal lost 2-1 to Wolves in November, a result so damaging that Arteta was answering questions about his job rather than European qualification. They would sink even lower with defeats to Tottenham, Burnley and Everton before turning a Christmas corner. If Arsenal are to salvage something from this season, that kind of extended slump cannot happen again.
In truth, this is a far different Arsenal side in which Nicolas Pepe, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe have formed a dangerous triptych behind a striker no longer struggling for goals and in which Thomas Partey is now settled as a driving force from midfield. They will be more worried about their Leno replacement than their broken confidence. “But still we lost and we have to react,” said the Arsenal boss, oscillating between disgust and confusion about that Luiz red card. That burning injustice has to become motivation rather than burden.
The misery of Arsenal’s worst league start in almost 30 years means there is little room to manoeuvre in this second half of the season. Tuesday was a blow but it must not become the first of a series of blows. How resilient are this new Arsenal? We are about to learn the answer to that question.
Sarah Winterburn
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