It should have been obvious. A weekend full of dramatic game-changing late goals could only end with another, perhaps its most significant, late twist.
None of this should feel as important as it does when we are still in September. But here we all are. After Eddie Nketiah scored the most significant goal of his Arsenal career in the 97th minute of a match played 13 months after he left the club, Arsenal themselves left it very nearly as late to take full advantage after another frantic and frenetic visit to St James’ Park.
It is a ground where Mikel Arteta and his Arsenal side have all manner of history and not much of it good. An awful, awful lot of it has in fact involved shedding all vestiges of dignity in response to entirely routine decisions.
And for so long that looked like it was going to be the story again. Another missed opportunity. More evidence for The Conspiracy after Arsenal were denied a penalty just because Nick Pope had actually won the ball, before Nick Woltemade was scandalously allowed to score a goal despite Gabriel having a fit of the vapours in his presence.
Perhaps it’s for the best that we’ll all now be spared quite such intense discourse, because what Arsenal rather brilliantly opted for here was going out and winning the game rather than becoming consumed by grief and grievance. It’s much better for you, in every way.
Even when the game appeared set to end in a crushingly irritating defeat for the Gunners, we were poised to try and reassure them that this had been a performance from which much could still be taken, that nothing was f*cked, the season still young, and this team still growing into itself.
Right up until he absolutely, crucially wasn’t, Nick Pope had been the best player on the pitch. Among a solid collection of decent saves were two stunners to deny Eberechi Eze early on and Jurrien Timber’s close-range header in a frantic second half.
But even without the ‘opposition keeper having a day out’ element, Arsenal would still have had so much to take from this game even had it not had its stunningly happy ending.
Arsenal have so often approached big games with the handbrake on. Here, at a ground where their recent record is dire and facing a defence that had kept four clean sheets in five games, Arsenal instead threw the kitchen sink.
Eze was at his brilliant, waspish and impish best in the No. 10 role, which had the added benefit of making Viktor Gyokeres a functioning member of the team for the first time against higher-class opposition.
It obviously didn’t do any harm to see Bukayo Saka back involved from the start for the first time since his latest injury lay-off.
Arsenal started the game superbly well and, even without the penalty hoopla, could have been a couple of goals clear before Woltemade’s sucker-punch of a header gave Newcastle a lead they couldn’t quite believe.
It was a fun goal, though. For a couple of reasons. Gabriel would redeem himself in the grandest manner in due course, but the realisation that he could do nothing to prevent Woltemade’s goal beyond pretending to be fouled and really, really committing to that bit was quite simply incredibly funny.
Arsenal bring such magnificent physicality to bear when attacking set-pieces, as Gabriel himself showed late, late on here when powering home that all-important winner, that it’s always just quite funny to witness the cognitive dissonance occasionally at work in their defensive efforts.
The fact it came from a corner needlessly conceded by a loose Cristhian Mosquera backpass only added to the sense of frustration for Arsenal, who must have known deep down they had no real case with their appeals here but had more solid reasoning to be developing a sense of Here We Go Again on Tyneside.
And it was also funny because the identity of the scorer allowed us to spend much of the half-time analysis enjoying Les Ferdinand pronouncing his name ‘Voldemort’. Or as Arsenal call him, He Who Must Not Be Marked.
Despite Gabriel’s best efforts at aggrieved indignation, it was never going to stick. It was never going to be the first-half decision that could actually be contested.
We’ve gone back and forth on the Pope-Gyokeres penalty decision about 15 times. We are edging towards concluding it is One Of Those and that nothing more can be usefully said or done, and then proceeding to remove all the splinters from our fence-sitting arse.
The fact it’s an overturned on-field decision adds a layer of further discussion, but if we’re pushed for a definitive position that we will then steadfastly insist is the only correct one and argue about on the internet with all-comers for the rest of time, then we just about land on the side of the correct outcome being reached. Your mileage may vary.
To our mind, Pope’s touch is significant enough to impact what comes next, and the fact his contact with Gyokeres comes from the same movement with the same limb and without any of the obvious reckless out-of-control violence that renders any comparison with Robert Sanchez on Bryan Mbeumo last weekend instantly moot is just about enough to convince us.
Without wishing to get too entirely lost in this deep grass, there’s an observation we’d make on ‘clear and obvious’ here that feels important. And that’s how precisely Jarred Gillett came to his original decision to award the penalty.
Because there are two scenarios here. One, he saw Pope’s touch but deemed it insufficient to prevent what came next from being a foul. In that case, it’s entirely subjective and very hard to argue a clear and obvious error was made.
But in the other version, Gillett hasn’t spotted Pope’s touch when he makes his original on-field decision. Neither Peter Drury nor Gary Neville spotted that touch even after several replays.
That was mainly because Drury was having far too much fun saying ‘DOGSO’, sure, but the point still stands: it was fair enough to miss that in real time, but also much easier to consider the difference between ‘Pope doesn’t touch it’ and ‘Pope does in fact touch it’ as a clear and obvious decision-altering event.
If Gillett’s thought process is that he’s given the penalty believing Pope makes no contact and would not have given it had he thought there was contact, it becomes a much more acceptable application of our old friend ‘clear and obvious’. Nobody is now arguing over the existence of Pope’s contact, just the significance of it.
But we’re boring ourselves now. It doesn’t even really matter now anyway.
And that’s because Arsenal’s hammering at the Newcastle door finally paid off in the closing minutes as they matched Liverpool in forcing victory even as the opportunity appeared to be slipping gallingly away.
One minor gripe – and it is only minor, given how well he played – is that Eze’s all-action turn at No 10 had nudged Declan Rice back into a slightly deeper role than we’ve grown accustomed to. It’s something for Arteta to think about, and doesn’t feel like an unsolvable problem. But if Eze does, as we strongly suspect he will, confirm himself as a key starter in any game where unpicking a stubborn defence is the order of business, it must not come at the expense of Rice’s ability to have a final-third impact.
His massive importance in that regard was shown by the equaliser, with his cross from the left deliciously perfect and glanced in off the post in textbook little-eyebrows fashion by Mikel Merino.
At that moment, you sensed Arsenal would go on and win the game. That – ridiculous as it sounds and September as it still somehow is – they had to go on and win the game.
The unstoppable nature of the equaliser left you feeling for Pope after his stellar display; but the capricious nature of elite football was all too evident in Arsenal’s winner for which he was at serious fault twice.
Only Pope will know quite what he was trying to achieve with an attempt at a quick clearance that scudded barely 50 yards straight to Myles Lewis-Skelly. Even Pope himself might not know how, precisely, he planned to teleport through a scrum of Arsenal players to lay a fist on the corner that eventually resulted and changed everything.
Gabriel, of course, has form for precisely this kind of goal. But this feels even more monumental than any he has managed before. So big does it feel, so impactful on the wider narrative of the entire Premier League season, that we’re even relatively content the Celebration Police won’t be launching any serious investigations around the aftermath.
Maybe we’re being naively summer-child optimistic there, just as we are in imagining there won’t now be a flurry of furious Arsenal fans who instead of celebrating a seismic victory will instead still want to debate the penalty decision until halfway into the next international break.
But we don’t think there’s any such naivety or misplaced optimism in declaring the title race well and truly on.
Arsenal would surely have taken this position if offered it back in August. To have emerged from this teak-tough opening set of six games just two points off Liverpool’s pace-setting and meaningfully clear of both Man City and Chelsea amounts to extremely satisfactory damage limitation.
It all looks a lot more straightforward for Arsenal between now and the third international break of the season in November. This is their time. And it could definitely now be their season.
