We remain endlessly fascinated by Arsenal. There might on occasion be a more interesting football team, but only very, very rarely a more interesting club.
Arsenal is a land of extremes. From the outside it just looks utterly exhausting. They permanently occupy one of two states: imminent world domination, and imminent falling in of the entire f*cking sky. There is no in between. Things at Arsenal are never just fine.
It goes some way, we think, to explaining the Celebration Police phenomenon, and also The Conspiracy. It’s been noted before by sager observers that every Arsenal game has about it the feel of a cup final. Arsenal are permanently living on the edge. Every win is a seismic moment, every defeat – or even draw – an unprecedented disaster from which there is no hope of recovery. Until the next win, and the cycle begins again.
When you view every match as a cup final, you’re going to celebrate every win like a cup final. When every draw is a catastrophe, the tinfoil hats will never be far away.
And it’s not just something as mundane as results of football matches. Oh dear me no. It’s everything. The Kai Havertz news cycle of the last few weeks is just perfectly and magnificently Arsenal.
His journey has taken him from being a bottle-less fraud of a striker, a player considered such fair game for ridicule that he even got pelters for putting a goal on a plate for Martin Odegaard in a match that would have been a big deal even at other, less batsh*t clubs.
When Havertz then became the first player in the history of football to miss a good chance, all hell broke loose, to the extent that not even him subsequently scoring a very good goal could shift the needle on his accepted and proven ineptitude. Had it not been for Myles Lewis-Skelly celebrating a goal, it’s likely Havertz would have been the main talking point even after a 5-1 win.
Insanity.
And now, of course, Havertz is injured. Scoring and assisting big goals in big games couldn’t shift the narrative around him, but getting injured certainly could. Now he is no longer a fraud. Now he is a key player, an irreplaceable player, his absence a nightmare hammer injury blow setback catastrophe.
The very idea that the truth might lie somewhere between these two extremes is one that must never, ever be considered for even a single second lest the entire world that has been constructed around Arsenal collapse in on itself and us all.
Maybe it’s just us, but this season more than any other recent season seems to have taken the already extreme Arsenal Experience and turned it up to 11.
There is a constant, swirling sense of CRISIS never, ever being more than a single game away for a team that is objectively good and doing objectively well. Sure, the domestic cup exits are sub-optimal and another trophyless season would be a worthy talking point. But they remain in striking distance at the top of the Premier League and as good a chance as pretty much anyone in what does look a very wide open Champions League this year.
We do have a theory for just why it’s all so febrile and rattled this year, if you’re interested. And that theory is essentially this: Liverpool.
We put it to you that were Arsenal seven points behind Manchester City again that, sure, it would still be very Arsenal and very dramatic and overblown, but it wouldn’t be as unhinged as it is now that it’s Liverpool’s coat-tails to which they desperately cling.
There’s a broiling frustration about Arsenal this season, isn’t there? A sense of opportunities missed, an indignation that Manchester City have finally revealed their all-too-human flaws and it is Liverpool rather than the Gunners set to reap the benefits.
It is far, far harder to rationalise for the Arsenal hivemind. Every comforting self-mythologising defence they had for failing to overcome the Evil City Empire fails utterly when aimed Liverpool’s way.
Liverpool are a team that has done things the right way, as Arsenal see it: being very rich and successful at the most important time in the history of English football to be already very rich and successful. Proper Club, aren’t they? Not like your Citys or Chelseas.
Coming off second best to Liverpool is to come off second best to a true, level-playing-field rival. Which means Arsenal not in fact being the greatest and pluckiest team of against-the-odds strivers in history and just another rich club coming up slightly short. That does not fit with the self-identity of the sort of fan who refers to their club entirely unironically with the definite article.
It won’t do at all. And the fact it’s not even Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool only makes it worse. Arne Slot rocking up and winning the league in year one of a project? Without even making any signings? How on earth are Arsenal supposed to rationalise that.
And things have not got even worse for the Gunners, with last night’s magnificent last ever Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park revealing that this Liverpool team Arsenal can’t catch isn’t even perfect, but is in fact a headloss wheels-off melodramatic basket case as well.
Liverpool have stolen Arsenal’s identity and are living a better life with it. No wonder it stings.
