It’s not been a great week for Quad Gods but Arsenal safely avoided any costly fall as they ticked off one of the more routine but necessary steps towards history.
Wigan were swept aside by Arsenal’s history-chasers, who show no sign of succumbing to the February curse in the month when so, so many would-be quadruple winners are exposed as abysmal, embarrassing frauds who might in fact only win three or even two trophies in the end.
The significance of this win lay not in the fact Arsenal beat the 2013 FA Cup winners Wigan to reach the fifth round. That was close to a formality. What Arsenal did was ensure the win was achieved with the lowest possible degrees of stress and effort expended ahead of another big week that really should deliver another six points against relegation-haunted Wolves and Tottenham.
Arsenal’s quest for four trophies was propelled here by four goals in the space of 16 first-half minutes before Mikel Arteta and everyone else at a ground so often fraught with nerves and tension even when things are going well could enjoy a second-half stroll in which further goals were not hunted with any urgency and many of the first-teamers entrusted with the task were withdrawn during the second half.
Even second-teamers were getting a rest by the end, with Kepa Arrizabalaga making way for Tommy Setford in the closing stages.
How Arsenal would like to see the rest of the season pass so serenely. But even Spurs are likely to be more challenging than this.
That, if there is a word of caution to sound after such a stress-free afternoon, is it. It’s lovely to see Noni Madueke continue his good form, and enlivening to see Eberechi Eze pulling strings and dictating proceedings to such devastating effect.
But it seems of little value to talk about how or why Arsenal carved through Wigan with such ease. The difficulty tariff will be higher in every one of Arsenal’s remaining tests this season, barring an extremely unlikely kindness in the fifth-round draw on Monday evening.
We suspect that won’t stop some chatter, though.
And it will be inevitable that there will now be talk of the need for Arsenal to ‘release the handbrake’ having shown what they can do.
Arteta certainly will, because he knows precisely how he wants to approach this tilt at history and immortality and isn’t about to change now.
Another game ticked off, just a possible 24 to go for Arsenal to become the real Quad Gods.
