They say once is never and twice is always, and that’s exactly how it felt on the second successive Monday on which Arsenal’s players will have met to stare at the burning embers of a fire they started on their own patch. For the first time in Premier League history, the Gunners have failed to win two games in a row having held a two-goal lead.
By contrast, you have to go back 59 occasions since Manchester City held a two-goal lead in any competition and didn’t win. Even then, it was with the title already secured in May 2021.
How quickly the narrative shifts. How adroitly doubt rushes into the cracks when you allow them to form. Mikel Arteta‘s side still hold a four-point lead at the top of the Premier League and the league title is still in their hands.
So why is the presumption that the Manchester City monolith will now trample everything in its path? Because Arsenal allowed that assumption to place its hands around their neck.
The creep of outrage culture and extremism of opinion in our media means that every defeat is initially viewed through the prism of the choke. Every failure to win a trophy is a bottle job from a group of soft-centred wastrels.
In fact, there are really only two reasonable examples in the Premier League era: Arsenal wasted an eight-point lead and lost to struggling Leeds in 2003 and Newcastle and Kevin Keegan became suffocated by the pressure of Sir Alex Ferguson’s calculated mind games in 1996. Liverpool’s 2013-14 season is widely touted as a statue to collapse, but they only ever held a three-point advantage over Manchester City. Jurgen Klopp‘s side clearly struggled to cope with the pressure, but that isn’t the same as “bottling”.
There are a dozen reasons a team can struggle to sprint over the finish line. For Liverpool last season, it was the sheer weight of Manchester City’s relentlessness (Liverpool took 50 points from their last 54 available – that isn’t a choke).
Teams have been undone by crucial injuries – think Roy Keane in 1997-98, Fernando Torres in 2007-08 or Nemanja Vidic in 2011-12. Managerial experience can also play a part, as was the case with Keegan vs Ferguson. Or a team simply reverts to its natural mean, as with Norwich City in 1992-93.
Arsenal are clearly feeling the pressure – how could they not be? They have played after City on four of the last five weekends and, each time, have followed a City victory. Their one flaw all season has been the concession of sloppy goals, so it’s little surprise that has forced this recent stumble.
They had been prodigious defensively away from the Emirates – four goals conceded before Christmas – but have now conceded two or more goals in three of their last five games.
But there’s a different diagnosis for what has slipped. Conceding goals is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Arsenal have not been throttled by pressure. They have played too freeform, if anything – “Playing flicks and losing the ball inside,” as Arteta says.
Instead, it is complacency that has pulled Arsenal apart a little at the seams. And that’s what will really nag away in the small hours when sleep is a distant hope.
At Anfield, you might call it a silly misstep. Arsenal scored twice in the opening 28 minutes and then coasted. They toyed with Liverpool as a cat with a mouse, never considering that the mouse might land on its feet and scuttle off to safety.
But to repeat that trick in their next match in an almost identical scenario – two early goals and the chance to kill off a fragile opponent – is bizarre. It is true that Arsenal struggled to regain composure thereafter, and Bukayo Saka’s penalty miss was surely provoked by a pressured situation, but the seeds were planted by insouciant complacency.
Counter-logically, that offers some hope. Certainly, if you were to pick one flaw in your title-challenging team, failing to kill off games when holding an apparently comfortable lead is a good one to have. Complacency typically provides its own solution. Having paid the price twice, you can imagine that Arteta, rightly furious, will eliminate any chance of it happening again.
But it also creates a potential cause for great regret. For all the reasons for a team to squander a lead at the top of the division when they haven’t ever won a trophy together, complacency must surely rank amongst the most galling. When you hold your glorious future in your own hands and all it requires is a firm grip, juggling comes with a health warning.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/ixIzP7a
Post a Comment