Zamina mina. Waka, waka, hé-hé. By the end of this gruelling, bruising, deep tissue ache of a football match, it felt as though the opening 96 minutes had been staged simply as an extended tease for a startlingly carefree final 30 seconds.
Up to that point Arsenal and Chelsea had produced something that felt like the football equivalent of having your eyes descaled with a wire brush. This was a dense, gristly kind of physical ballet. Johan Cruyff once said that in football the clock is never your friend. It’s either moving too fast or too slowly. Here the clock didn’t really seem to move at all, or to be going backwards. The clock hated everyone.
And then suddenly, as it began to dawn that this really would actually end, it was school’s out for summer. It was the Gloucestershire cheese rolling championships. It was drunken farmers falling down a hill, as Arsenal broke, the pitch emptied, and Kai Havertz found himself all alone and through on goal.
Havertz had time to tiptoe around Robert Sánchez and roll the ball into the net, killing off this semi-final second leg, 1-0 on the night, 4-2 on aggregate. And so it was time for the release, blue puffa-clad subs capering on to the pitch, bodies writhing and tumbling in the stands.
The Arsenal supremacy continues to rise. We are entering the foothills here, approaching the final battlegrounds of this strange slow-burn season. And the game is, if not quite afoot, then almost afoot. A carefully micromanaged version of afoot. Arsenal have one final in the bag, the Carabao Cup next month. The manner of victory is irrelevant. This semi-final was always just filler. Arsenal have three games in eight days, then a week off, then nine days off. Winning is all that matters right now.
But their season has reached a point of preignition. League lead sustained. Champions League path set. Like it or not, the journey from here is starting to narrow a little. Time to dream a micromanaged dream.
The chances of winning everything remain massively remote. It doesn’t happen. But the fact remains Arsenal could still win a quadruple in the next four months. It is worth simply noting this fact, which is edging just a tiny little bit from could towards can. Nowhere, really nowhere near should or will. Here’s what it would take. Eleven more league wins. Six domestic cup games, one that final, another Wigan next up in the FA Cup. Four rounds of Champions League (OK, yes, very hard. But they did top the mega table).
What does that add up to? Twenty‑three wins between now and June to win a quadruple. Hyper pressure games. Finals. Tiny margins. It won’t happen. It never happens. But it’s a pretty good space to be in.
It’s a reward for simply not falling away. Best of all this is couched in its own strange, tortured sense of jeopardy, because nothing has been won to this point. This is all manoeuvring, performance anxiety, a referendum on Arteta-ism. Are we seeing the ultimate almost-not-quite? Or the harvesting of an entire era in the space of the next few months? Is this actually happening? Is it real?
That subtext was very welcome on a horrible night in north London, drenched in the kind of rain that seems to fall sideways, upwards, diagonally, whipped by the kind of wind that has its own malevolent intent, concerned only with sliding up the angles of your trouser legs.
The Emirates Stadium was still a cauldron of smoke, lights and semi‑final event glamour at kick‑off. At which point almost nothing happened for a really long time. Energy was expended. But it felt glazed, trapped, a series of patterns being run.
Actually, one thing happened. Chelsea disrupted Arsenal’s corner taking, two of their attacking players scooting upfield as the kick was about to be taken. It was an interesting move. It did muddle Arsenal’s plan. Chelsea’s fans have struggled to take instantly to Liam Rosenior but he seems smart and likeable.
Otherwise, Arsenal didn’t play like trophy hunters, destiny merchants, a team poised on the edge of greatness. But then, nobody ever really does very much in the course of these things. It all gets retro-fitted in victory.
It was interesting to see Declan Rice playing well in his new deeper role. Ahead of him Arsenal had three creative players, plus Viktor Gyökeres who just basically existed, stodgily, footballing corned beef. Eberechi Eze was dogged but also restrained as the No 10. He looks at times like someone playing football from a set of instructions in 17 languages. Are they Grealishing him?
With an hour gone both teams had had one shot on target according to the stats, which felt generous. Then came the delirium of those final seconds, and the rush of all those swirling possibilities.
