The unbearable weight of Arsenal’s long, long wait for the Premier League title

As far back as two weeks ago, when Arsenal were in an even better position than they are now, Liverpool players said they could sense that Arteta’s side were tense; that their body language wasn’t comfortable.

It was much worse on Sunday. Manchester United sensed blood, went for it, and have now sent Arsenal spinning and reeling.

The mood among the squad was said to be one of angst on Monday.

That might seem natural after a 3–2 defeat like that… but should it be?

It’s actually remarkable when you stand back.

Arsenal are still four points clear in the league. They had been in relatively good form, as their lead at the top of the table illustrates. In two other competitions, they defeated two quality sides in Chelsea and Internazionale with relative ease. The victory at the San Siro was almost only notable for how business-like it was.

That’s just what this team do. Such performances strengthen the argument that they are actually the best team in Europe right now.

Or, at least, they are when they actually play with a sense of freedom – because that is very much not the case in the Premier League right now.

A team with all of these qualities now looks like it needs the psychological reset of a mid-season break. The transformation has been remarkable.

Arsenal’s last three matches – two 0–0s and a 3–2 defeat – have been surrounded by tension.

It’s all the worse since the game immediately before that was a 4–1 win over putative title challengers Aston Villa, when Arteta’s side did indeed seem to show their true level and dispatch Unai Emery’s team from the title race.

So, what’s changed?

Some of it is the immense weight that comes from, well, the wait; the grand quest to finally be champions again.

I wrote a piece on exactly this before that 0–0 against Liverpool, and how Arsenal’s biggest opposition might be themselves. Manchester United felt this ahead of the 1992–93 title, and Liverpool were similar at various points during their 30-year wait – especially in 2013–14.

Every season makes it worse. Every inch you get closer actually makes the pain all the more acute.

Arsenal aren’t there yet, but they’re getting there. Twenty-two years is already a long time for a big club to go without a title, and that is a club with plenty of experience of this.

One of the defining works of modern football culture is actually about a long Arsenal wait for a title: Fever Pitch.

This clearly feeds into the home crowd, which has now been the subject of much debate, even if it is subconscious. There’s an institutional memory.

If all that is inevitable, however, then so too is the question of how you deal with it.

This is where Arteta now has some choices.

The situation will be all the worse for Arteta since there isn’t a manager who is as controlling – not even Pep Guardiola. If Arsenal’s great title rival is said to be infamously “neurotic” about tactics, sources say Arteta is like that with everything around tactics, too. This is someone who controls the temperature of the ice baths, who would consider “changing the angle of the steering wheel on the bus if he felt it would give his team an advantage”.

And yet, just as used to be the case with Guardiola in the Champions League, that very control may now be constraining.

You could see it in the United game. It was as if Arsenal weren’t really “playing”, at least in the sense of expressing themselves. They were going through the processes, exactly as the manager wants.

And yet, in thinking about everything so deliberately, they stopped being themselves. How else do you describe the way they actually lost it?

Arsenal have been masters at securing a lead, after all. Once they went 1–0 up, that really should have been that, as had been the case in the previous 24 games in which they went ahead. Not this time. There was a different air.

So it was that one of the best midfield passers in the world, Martin Zubimendi, who has a 90 per cent completion rate, somehow played a ball back to David Raya that let Bryan Mbuemo and Manchester United in.

If Arsenal were playing naturally, that just wouldn’t have happened. But nothing about their game was natural. It was all so pained.

They were perhaps unfortunate to come up against a United side now enjoying an emotional wave of their own – not least with the two speculative strikes that won it. But that’s football. That’s what you have to dig out.

Arsenal let it all get to them.

And they shouldn’t. It’s only January.

This isn’t unique to them, either. Prospective champions all have to go through bad moments. Sir Alex Ferguson’s United used to endure them regularly.

The nature of the past few seasons has probably just changed perceptions of that. Manchester City have been a machine unlike any other, with arguably the greatest coach of all time working in the most lavishly funded football project ever seen. Challenging them also primed Liverpool to surge to the title in the last two seasons they won it.

This is now something else weighing over Arsenal: the idea of that City side coming down the tracks, almost more than the inconsistent reality. Villa are right in there too.

But titles are supposed to be hard won. You have to go through these moments.

You can’t really win it by process alone, as Arteta has been striving to do. Such achievements usually demand something deeper, something more emotional, ironically.

Arsenal are now going to have to show that.

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