It always seemed likely, somehow, that Arsenal’s season was going to come down to Gabriel Magalhães and a set piece. Just not, ideally, like this.
Football does love a note of dramatic irony. And while Arsenal may have lost this Champions League final on penalties to Paris Saint-Germain after three brain-mangling hours of unresolved jab, smother and counter-thrust in the humid green bowl of the Puskas Arena, this was also a brilliant, high-grade, dizzyingly tense game of football.
After half an hour it was already the kind of day where it becomes impossible to remember a time when this game wasn’t happening, where the Puskas Arena is just the universe now, when there is just always this single humid moment, the same rolling bowl of noise, the red, white and blue shapes, the constantly shifting patterns.
Even as the game edged into penalties at 1-1 close to 9pm the night still felt like a series of weirdly vivid moments. Here is David Raya being simultaneously triple-maintained by the Arsenal pit crew, pounded on both thighs, brain fed with data by a pair of crouching men, another flooding his mouth with fresh fluids.
In the stands the same Arsenal fan had been leaping up all night, stringy arms beating the air, chain bouncing, king of the stairwell, a man completely lost in this time and this place. Down on the pitch Mikel Arteta had come to Budapest in his summer wardrobe, the light grey slacks jettisoned in favour of some very dark grey slacks and a silky polo shirt, poised on his chalk line like an unusually trim and energetic darts player.
By now Arteta was into his sixth dance-battle rondo-huddle of the night, crouching and clenching and barking every word. He loves to talk about suffering. Across his three hours here Arsenal’s manager must have done 20,000 star jumps and 650 shuttle sprints, never letting his intensity drop. How will this man ever sleep again? They’re going to need some kind of elephant tranquilliser gun to put him down for the night.
And so PSG have retained their title, completing the much-trumpeted two-peat. They are a hugely deserving champion team. All the more so at the end of a game that was made beautiful by Arsenal making sure anyone who wanted to win this thing had to be good enough to beat them, insisting that every trick and feint and moment of grace was gouged out of something hard and real.
By the end this was a reminder too that some things are long, difficult and nuanced, that the world’s most popular form of entertainment is still like this at its best: a saga, grudging in its rewards, despite what you might hear about instant content, reel culture and the allegedly junk attention spans of young people.
For Arsenal’s supporters there will be genuine pleasure in the performance of a young team with five English players in it; in Arteta successfully asserting his tactical plan at this rarefied level; and most specifically, perhaps, in the performance of Myles Lewis-Skelly, who was given the hardest job in football, taking on Vitinha in a Champions League final, and was sensationally good.
The Puskas Arena is a huge grey metal bowl, steeply tiered on all sides, its white mesh tubing roof leaning in over the pitch. Budapest had been clammy all day, with a landlocked central European summer stillness in the air. The noise at kick-off captured the fan culture of these two clubs. The Paris sound is always dominated by the endlessly drumming ultras end, who basically just sing whatever is happening, a wall of people making noise near a football match; the Arsenal half of the stadium was less choreographed, more reactive, the familiarly English sense of a crowd having a conversation with itself.
The Killers came out and did a really fast, sweaty medley of their songs and nobody really asked why and it was fine. And from the start there were some intriguing notes in the team Arteta picked.
Right-back had to be Cristhian Mosquera, who is not a right-back, who seems too upright, too square, too long in the limbs to turn and twist like a right-back, and who was up against the frankly terrifying Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. But he played really well in his time on the pitch.
Then there was Lewis-Skelly, who completed the most extraordinary bends-inducing redemption arc, from ghost player, filler in a vest, to facing off against the best midfield in Europe. He played 90 minutes and was fearlessly good in every one of them. Not on the bare numbers perhaps, but in his energy and covering and game intelligence, the ability to plug every gap and always offer an angle. There were some lovely moments. A surge through midfield in the first half, and a thigh-shredding charge back to dispossess Désiré Doué on 78 minutes. Lewis-Skelly and Declan Rice would have looked a very good option as England’s starting midfield pivot at the World Cup.
Arsenal scored with the first proper piece of football in the game. It was made by a Leandro Trossard block-assist, the ball deflected into the path of Kai Havertz, suddenly all alone and spidering his way in on goal, and finishing brilliantly into the roof of the net. Matvey Safonov can often look like he’s just wandered into a pub in Maidstone and is trying to sell you a bag of kidneys. He had a good game here, although Arsenal will regret that he didn’t actually have to get a hand on any of their penalties in the shootout. He did though make the choice easy for Havertz, basically squatting down and saying, go on, put it up there.
For the first quarter of the game Arsenal’s plan worked. They gave up the ball, but in the process de-fanged PSG. On his touchline Luis Enrique already looked like he’d just run a desert marathon in swimming trunks, eyes boggling, T-shirt darkened with sweat. Arsenal’s defensive interventions were superbly timed, always calm and high-craft. The best part of the Premier League is its utter focus, its extreme levels of intensity in every moment. And there was something fascinating in seeing PSG asked to rise to that level, after a season playing in a domestic league that has basically been turned into the County Championship. Doué and Kvaratskhelia will be fidgeting their way up the steps when they get home, waiting for William Saliba to jump out of the bushes, wondering if when they flick on the lights Lewis-Skelly is already going to be there occupying the chaise longue.
On 61 minutes, Paris finally found their moment, Mosquera drawn into a foul in the box by Kvaratskhelia. Ousmane Dembélé rolled the kick into the corner. Arsenal might have folded. They didn’t. PSG also kept coming, finding their own more bloody-minded gear.
And so we went to penalties. A word about Gabriel and the final miss. He was made to wait by the referee, who insisted on speaking to kicker and keeper. This really was a moment of random chance, the day suddenly veering into something else, losing its edge at the very last.
Gabriel had played superbly well. His kick ballooned mockingly into the crowd. The fireworks erupted. Arsenal’s players didn’t crumple, but walked slowly around the pitch as it was invaded by scampering wonks, applauding the fans and drinking in a moment that they will be hungry to taste again.
A season and a champion team that some have struggled to love, or at least to watch as a TV production, dished up a thrillingly intense, high-quality end note here. The game may be cruel, gruelling and hostage to details, but the lesson of Budapest was that it is undeniably still good.
