After tea and cake and Declan Rices. After Ebe Eze and Viktor Gyökeres. Should I, after three straight second places, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? Hmm. Maybe not. With all due apologies to the living descendants of TS Eliot, the love song of Mikel Arteta still doesn’t really scan or rhyme or have a clear endnote as yet, even as the six-year anniversary of his appointment as Arsenal manager approaches.
This is normal enough. It is obviously incorrect to conclude, as many have, that Arsenal’s manager has to win a trophy this season or be remembered not just as a fraud, but as a Lego-haired billion-pound-spend fraud, the worst kind of fraud there is. Sport doesn’t work in simple metre. Uncertainty is key to its fascination.
In reality the Arteta era has brought fresh energy, the team regeared, Champions League status re-established. The winning of cups and pots is hostage to endless variables. The best does not rule out the good. Others must also succeed.
By the same token the idea of early-season title deciders is best dismissed as punditry gush, marketing pitch, whiffle around the lighted dais. What can August really tell us? Most teams are in flux right now. Are Chelsea good? Nobody knows. Winter into spring remains the real testing ground, the moment players and managers are asked to stare a little deeper into their own reflection.
And yet, and yet, and yet, sometimes all these things can actually be true, or close to true. And Liverpool versus Arsenal at Anfield on Sunday afternoon really does look like a key note, not just in terms of final points tallies, but in Arteta’s own trajectory. Because something does need to shift here.
There is by now something a little haunting about the uncertainty around this team’s ultimate endpoint, something tender and unformed about the sight of Arteta out there on the touchline in the same primly tailored black jacket and shoes, like a police sniper trying to blend in at a parents’ evening, revolving his hands in that familiar choreography of alarm and dismay.
What are we looking at here? What role is Arteta destined to play? Is he the architect of an era? Is he Prince Hamlet? Just another ensemble player? Perhaps even the fool, the man who talked endlessly about winning but somehow forgot to win, the coach who made his players listen to You’ll Never Walk Alone while they trained before one of his early trips to Anfield, then went up there and dutifully lost 4-0?
There are good reasons to regard Sunday as a genuine opportunity to shape that dynamic. For a start this isn’t really the third game of a new season. For Arteta it is instead the 117th game of 152, three seasons of work on the same host body that have led in a straight line to this point.
And this is the kind of game that can offer a genuine point of ignition. Liverpool are a perfect example of how that can work. There is an on-this-day point here, the kind of Ominous Anniversary stuff football loves to weave into its stories. On Sunday it will be almost exactly six years since an Arsenal team managed by Arteta’s predecessor also travelled to Anfield.
That Jürgen Klopp Liverpool team were at a similar point in their lifespan to the current Arsenal: also coming off three seasons of progress, also desperate to end a title drought, also rebalanced around some key recent signings.
In the event Liverpool ran right over Unai Emery’s team, won 3-1, strolled about the place bathed in champion aura, and obliterated the rest of the field from that point. That fixture was, like this one, the third Premier League game of the season. It was also, and here we must cue the eerie, conspiratorial music, Klopp’s own 117th league game of his first three full seasons in charge.
At this point the comparison falls away into pattern seeking and general numberwang. Liverpool were champions of Europe at that point. Klopp had been at Liverpool for three full seasons. Arteta has five under his belt. Klopp was also an established alpha manager, winning the league something that always seemed stitched into the arc. Arteta is not this. He’s a chalk sketch, an idea waiting to happen. But the league is also a little different now. And Arteta has a chance to learn something else from Arne Slot’s luminous debut season last year.
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Arsenal’s early run is tough. Anfield this weekend is followed by Nottingham Forest and Manchester City at home and Newcastle away. It will be a high-wire act to get through this more or less intact while bedding in new players. But it is already clear other teams will drop points, that the season is generally more random and rushed and squeezed.
Last season Arsenal began like a damp box of matches, dropping 12 points in their first 10 games. This time around they have an opportunity to assert from the off what seems undeniably true, that they have the best-balanced squad of any top team, and in the process take the season by the throat as Liverpool did last time.
More to the point, there really are no excuses now. Arsenal have all the tools. Even injuries look like opportunities. Kai Havertz, Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard may be out? Well, here come Eze, Gyökeres and Noni Madueke, all of whom may have played in any case, and who may even be an upgrade in the right form.
The midfield looks strong. The defence is set. The goalkeeper is good. Best of all Arsenal’s signings are coherent. They address omissions. A team that have seemed at times trapped within their own structures, chasing the game with all the carefree abandon of a fly buzzing down a window pane, have brought in specialist risk takers.
Eze is a genuinely inventive attacker, who needs to be encouraged simply to be this again, to be it more, to the max. The questions around Gyökeres have been along the lines of: is he an Arteta player? The point is that he shouldn’t fit too snugly. He should be awkward.
If Gyökeres is physical and boisterous then this is a good thing in a team that can spend a little too long sharpening its scalpel. The goals he scores will tend to be the kind Arsenal wouldn’t have scored before. He bullocks and breaks lines. He does this quite often from the left. Just having a threat on that side may unlock something else in Saka, the world’s most double-teamed man.
All of which sounds encouraging in outline. But fixing your weaknesses creates its own pressure and a significant type of pressure for a coach who has measured out his managerial life so far in almost-but-not-quites. For Arsenal taking the league to the wire this time will be a question of will, fearlessness, the readiness to lean into those new strengths.
Sunday is an obvious first chance. Liverpool will still be favourites to win the game. They’re the champions. They haven’t lost to Arsenal at home since the pre-Klopp era 13 years ago. The new attack looks thrillingly potent. But they have also shown their weaknesses this season. Liverpool’s midfield has looked open. At Newcastle on Monday night there was a slight sense of muddle under the barrage of high balls. Gyökeres and Eze, who may make his debut, are good against opponents who like to have the ball and keep a high line.
There is at the very least an opportunity here for Arsenal; if not to decide anything right now, then to show a willingness to dare and to feel their own moment flicker a little closer.
