Disastrous 6-0 bottle jobs and four more reasons why Arsenal won’t win the Premier League
Arsenal have won their last seven Premier League games in a row, by an aggregate score of <checks and double checks because it’s f***ing mental> 31-3.
So obviously our immediate response is to come up with five reasons why the cocky, goal-grabbing, over-celebrating little bastards won’t win the league.
We’ve decided to make it extra hard on ourselves by not allowing ‘Man City exist’ and ‘Liverpool exist’ into our list of reasons. They have to be Arsenal reasons. This restriction was, in hindsight, an error but never mind that now.
For what it’s worth, we’re also going to be doing five equally robust and solid reasons why both City and Liverpool can’t win the league as well, before any of you start donning tinfoil and declaring us part of The Conspiracy.
Here we go, then. Five reasons why Arsenal won’t win the Premier League, even though they’re actually going to win it by 0.1 points and there’s not a single thing we or anyone else can do about it.
1) Underwhelming 6-0 bottle jobs
Are we starting by criticising a 6-0 win away from home that gives Arsenal a significant and potentially decisive goal-difference advantage over both Liverpool and City? You better believe we’re starting by criticising a 6-0 win away from home that gives Arsenal a significant and potentially decisive goal-difference advantage over both Liverpool and City.
If we were Arsenal fans, we’d have been deeply concerned by what we saw at Bramall Lane. Deeply concerned.
There isn’t much that hasn’t already happened in the 30-plus years of Barclays banter we call Our League but one such Everest is double-figures. There have been a handful of 9-0 wins and a 9-1, but no Premier League team has ever scored 10 (ten) vidiprinter-busting goals in a single game.
Even before Monday night’s bloodbath began, this looked as good an opportunity as you’re ever likely to get for someone to tick that particular item off the to-do list. Arsenal’s two previous away games had ended in 6-0 and 5-0 wins at West Ham and Burnley. Sheffield United’s last two home games had ended in 5-0 defeats to Aston Villa and Brighton. Maths tells you 10-0 was possible.
When Arsenal raced into a 3-0 lead inside 15 minutes and augmented this to 5-0 by half-time, it really looked on. But what did Arsenal do? They bottled it, is what they did. We’re sad to say there is simply no other way to describe it. A vast, mortifying bottle job in which yet again, just as the opportunity for greatness was opening up before them, they instead fell flat on their stupid face.
Sure, Ben White scoring with his left foot of all things was quite a funny bit of getting in on the act, and yes, ancient football lore dictates that the only possible results in any game with a 5-0 half-time score-line are in fact 5-0, 5-1 or 6-0 thanks to the twin tenets of Damage Limitation and Petering Out but Sheffield United are PURE RUBBISH and Arsenal have been scoring goals FOR FUN. We wanted, expected, nay demanded, more.
But more seriously, if Arsenal can bottle scoring 10 goals at Sheffield United, they can certainly bottle another title race.
READ: Top ten biggest Premier League title bottlejobs: Arsenal’s 2022/23 vintage cracks all-time rankings
2) They haven’t done it before
This one’s going to be there until it isn’t, frankly. City themselves had to overcome it in the early days of having all the money. Liverpool had to conquer it in 2020 after coming up so harshly short in 2019. Now Arsenal must do so. Getting that first title as a manager and a group of players is such a big deal. We’re not saying this title race is easy for Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp but they’ve not only been here before but succeeded and that must bring comfort.
Arsenal have now at least ticked off the seemingly obligatory near-miss and hopefully taken on board all necessary learnings, but that niggling, ticklish doubt will be there until such time as Martin Odegaard has the trophy in his hands and is embarrassing himself by gadding about and celebrating like he’s won the bloody league.
Until they know they can do it because they’ve done it, they will never know they can do it because they haven’t yet done it. It’s a paradox all right.
3) That rubbish Porto game
Oh, what’s that? We’re using the one recent, narrow, non-fatal defeat Arsenal have suffered in amongst all the 6-0 wins that we’ve also had a pop at as a stick to beat them with? Yes. Of course we are. What do you want us to do? They’ve left us f*** all else to go at here. We’re dangerously close to doing one about how the team with 31 goals in seven games still needs a Proper Striker.
Anyway. The Porto game. It was, to be fair, absolutely sh*t. It’ll still be fine because they’ll probably win the second leg 6-0 or something given that is apparently what Arsenal do now, but it was a game that raises concerns related to those outlined above.
It’s a long, long time since Arsenal have even been in a position to rectify their miserable record in Champions League last-16 ties, but the way it appeared to affect a group of players who should really carry no scars at all from the historical tendency to get spangled by Bayern Munich at this stage has to be a worry. Faced with a hurdle they had no experience of overcoming, they once again clattered into it. And this hurdle was ‘Not losing to Porto in a Champions League game’ which is a considerably teenier hurdle to clear than ‘Beating Manchester City in a Premier League title race’.
That this limp, shot-shy performance came in the midst of all their domestic goal-collecting tomfoolery if anything only makes it more alarming. It leaves no other reasonable explanation than the occasion getting to them in that vital moment, something which does not augur well for a title run-in. We’ve very nearly convinced ourselves here.
4) Direct combat with their rivals
Can spin this one whichever way you like, but the reality is that as Arsenal currently sit third and the current trend is very much for all three of the title contenders to win pretty much every week, they are the team that most conspicuously needs to not only keep winning themselves but for the others to not do that.
Given the now apparent and sizeable gulf between the top three and the rest, by far the easiest way to ensure that is by doing it yourself. Indeed, Arsenal have already shown as much having beaten both Liverpool and City at home and taken a point away from Anfield.
City facing Liverpool this weekend is a boost for the Gunners, of course, but they are still left with only one further chance to inflict damage themselves upon a direct rival, and it’s also the most difficult one of the lot at a ground where they have lost their last seven games by an aggregate score of 21-4.
5) The last two away games
While Arsenal’s lack of games against the two teams they’re directly involved with can be argued both ways, what is harder to spin as any kind of positive is a run-in that pits them against each of the three next-best teams in the final six games.
The gap to Villa, Spurs and Man United may now be assorted degrees of massive, but the table tells us these are nevertheless the next best teams despite how often the evidence may appear to suggest that – certainly with Spurs and United – this can’t possibly actually be the case.
Aston Villa are clearly right now the best of those three, and Arsenal do at least have the advantage of facing them at home and first of the bunch in mid-April. That one will probably be fine.
More ticklish, surely, is having to face Tottenham and United in their last two away games of the season at a time when any margin for error is likely to be somewhere between wafer-thin and non-existent.
Even if the games were the other way round it would be better; at least that way there would be some prospect of yet again winning the title on Tottenham turf and presumably forcing them to move to yet another new stadium. Seems vanishingly unlikely, however, that anything Arsenal do between now and the end of April is going to put them in position to win the league with three whole games to go.
Still, Arteta’s side are better than both of those idiots, which shouldn’t be forgotten, but they nevertheless represent something very close to the least appetising away fixtures the computer could possibly have thrown up for crunch time when arses will be going 5p-50p anyway.