Boring

On Atleti, Crystal Palace, and writer's block

Writing about the same football team every week is, I’m discovering, a unique challenge. I began because I felt Arsenal generated so many little stories that made me feel things that were quite difficult to elucidate, and that I wasn’t seeing elucidated particularly well elsewhere, and it seemed like an interesting and natural creative challenge. I was so full of these feelings I was convinced the words would just spill out of me, and for a while, they did. When Noni Madueke arrived I felt compelled to tell his story and that was easy; when Ebere Eze was announced alongside a particularly sharp pain in my personal life, those words came easy too. Feeling is creative fuel and so it’s no wonder this paragraph, the 144 words you’ve just read and are still reading, was the most difficult I’ve written about Arsenal to date.

I’ve always been terrified of this. Two wins, two enormous wins, one a dismantling of the team in Europe perhaps most resistant to being dismantled, the other a gruelling slog through England’s domestic cup champions, and I have so few words to write. When Viktor Gyokeres tackled the third goal against Atletico across the line and sheepishly pulled out his mask, I was on my feet, imploring to my friends: “I can’t believe my team are this good. I will never get used to this.” I think I was hoping I’d make it true by saying it out loud, as if by vocalising my desire I could somehow change how I felt, but I was lying: I can believe my team are this good, and I am used to this. In a small way, that breaks my heart.

This is the great tragedy of this Arsenal side, the precious thing Manchester City’s alleged cheating stole from us: the payoff to our story, the correct and natural positioning of our climactic event, coming as it should at the end of our third act, when our protagonists have changed and accepted truth, when the villains have fallen around us, when our shadows have been shrugged off and the feeling is at its height. Mikel Arteta is now marked as an underachiever, somehow, a perpetual loser, rather than the man who took a team from eighth to within one point of their greatest-ever Premier League points tally in three years; the man who broke the club’s goalscoring record, then broke it again; the man who equalled the Invincible’s record of 26 wins, and then went two further in the season after. These achievements should’ve been enough to secure a triumphant finale to this tale, but the natural ability of sport to shape human narrative is now second to the whims of the United Arab Emirates or whatever other nation-state decides to pick up its gilded pen. Numbers are not silverware, as any gleeful Twitter bot will tell you, and they are no replacement for a story’s proper end.

And so we’re left here, deep in the endgame, when the momentum has faded and it all feels a bit like a coda. Like we’re wrapping up loose ends rather than marching triumphantly towards our final act. Every win of every kind comes with a little asterisk: we’re playing for a prize we should’ve won two years ago. This is the doublethink at the heart of all the criticism of Arsenal. They’ll laugh and say Arsenal aren’t good enough to win anything, can’t win without set-pieces, that Arteta is a failure, while understanding it only touches a nerve because Arsenal are good enough to win everything, and have been for a long, long time.

My usual approach to Redstory has been to urge my readers not to lose touch with the emotion as we slog through win after joyless win but alas, this week I am in need of my own medicine. I suppose this newsletter is a story about writer’s block, and how to find your way back when the inspiration doesn’t strike, and I’m writing it as much for me as any of you.

This week will be the ninth of my (forgive me, I’m doing it again) winter arc. Since September 1 I’ve written seven Redstory blogs, one after each Premier League weekend, for a total of around fifteen thousand words - and lost 4.7kg, or about 6% of my body weight. Hold the applause, please, because I’ve hit a snag. Last Monday, I stopped sleeping properly. I got injured at football on Wednesday. By the weekend I was a shambling husk of a person. The physical progress had become so addictive I thought it’d just keep going, forever: it had become my primary source of meaning, and it felt so good I was blind to the whirlwind of caffeine and aggressive self-talk I was using to sustain training six times a week. I was over-working and under-eating, apparently, and cortisol conspired to take its revenge.

I’ve spent the last few days slowing down. It’s no surprise writing this morning was so painful, nor that what emerged from it was probably quite boring. I have hit a wall. And as I go deeper into this project of consistency, I find myself scared of the same thing that has ailed my connection to my football team. I began this process because I was hurting and now, almost two months in, that hurt is beginning to fade. It has been replaced by the usual noise of life, the humdrum of little heartaches that build a week and I know I am the kind of person to succumb to that very normal, very boring kind of discomfort. Pain yields over time and the energy to change yields with it. It would be very ‘me’ to settle back into the soft rhythm, to drift, to say I tried and the progress I made was good enough, even though I fell a little short; it would be very easy not to finish this incoherent blog, to just take a week off, because my ghosts have become hazy enough to ignore.

It’s really fucking amazing that Arsenal keep winning.

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Today, something magical happened: I deposited my coffee fund to my bank account for the first time. 37 of you contributed and I am impossibly grateful. It’s kinda saved my ass financially this month (why is October always so expensive?).

If you for some reason value these words and would like to ensure I can keep doing them every week - even when it’s hard - you can buy me coffee here.

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I’m sure Mikel Arteta faces these moments of complacency with the wackiest motivational techniques ever deployed in professional sports. As I try to reinvigorate my run to Christmas, I’ll probably settle for something a bit simpler: gently reminding myself of the original pain, and celebrating the wins I’ve had so far. Perhaps the same technique can reignite my connection to our Arsenal story. Three little vignettes stand out to me.

One: I wrote that I wanted to see Viktor Gyokeres ‘absolutely fucking break the net’ a couple of times in the near future, but his duck was broken by the total opposite phenomenon: an accident. Okay, so yes, he did swing his foot at the ball, but it trickled so slowly over the line it seemed almost sorry to do so. Then, minutes later, he scored with his penis (‘Viktor Cock-eres’ is very funny). They all count the same, I suppose. I’ve never agreed with the traditional line ‘he just needs one and the floodgates will open’ - look how he was treated just a few nights later, against Palace - as a punching bag by three massive centre halves who packed the box like sardines. He looked about as likely to take a shot on target as Palace did. This is the Premier League for Viktor Gyokeres: brutal, unforgiving, and designed to frustrate him specifically. Running the channels and brute-forcing a single inch in the box every week is not pretty work nor will it be rewarding, but it’s the job at hand. If the first celebration against Atleti - muted, sheepish, almost begrudging - was acknowledgement that he’s fallen from star man to the ugly business of water carrying, the second - a roaring, delighted sprint into the corner - was a celebration of how crucial that labour is. And probably he was yelling through the pain of a little ball-to-tip contact, just a bit.

Two: Myles Lewis-Skelly and Gabriel Martinelli combined for the evening’s best and most enjoyable goal. It was so fun partly because it was the result of Myles’ superpower - the fact he’s like a runaway train when he finds a head of steam, is totally impervious to being dispossessed at speed, and seems to have a sci-fi deflector shield engaged as he dribbles - but also because it was the creation of two players who’ve had a strange season so far. Gabriel Martinelli’s prolonged absence from the starting XI this term has generated a kind of lucid, controlled anger in him that has tempered his most erratic moments. He looks focused and decisive, like a blade taken to prolonged contact with a whetstone. Perhaps Martinelli is a weapon best used sparingly, when his mind and body is sharpest. Bukayo Saka responds to exposure: he gets angrier the more contact he takes, the more he fails, and that anger reaches a boiling point and explodes off his left foot; perhaps Martinelli instead gets furious in the dark, with his hands over his eyes, and keeping him there is the best way to hone his edge. Lewis-Skelly’s absence so far is much easier to explain: he broke through last season because Riccardo Calafiori couldn’t keep his legs functioning for more than a week, but now he can. Yes, MLS is a full England international and a superb player who looks incredibly comfortable even in the Champions League, but he is still just 18, and these careers are not straight lines. That he can come in and waltz through the mean streets of a Diego Simeone midfield is a wonderful sign.

Three: Eberechi Eze broke into the box in the second half against Atleti and attempted a flying kung-fu kick, but made only paltry contact; the ball wobbled into Gyokeres’ path, and then, somehow, over the line. Four days later, he tried it again. This time it flew true, and buried itself as a knife in the club of his heart. It was a remarkable finish and the kind of crazy moment Eze has been bought to provide. Fuck your control, your suffocation, your field tilt, watch this: HEE-YAH! He ambled over to the corner and pointed upwards as his teammates buried him and I couldn’t help thinking of the last time I’d seen him point to the sky, as he was unveiled in the stadium and the loudspeakers played Sampha’s Indecision: “Let it all work out.” I don’t believe in determinism, or God’s great and ordained plan, but it’s difficult to ignore the sheer inevitability of Eze scoring that goal, in that game, against that team. His non-celebration was apt for the moment. It was a quiet win, a dull win, but perhaps this is what the religious mean when they say it’ll all work out: consistency, a cavalcade of tiny little wins in the quiet, will lead to the rapturous.

Mikel Arteta said he enjoyed the Palace win more than any other this year. I am beginning to understand. The ugly, boring Arsenal wins, when the feeling has gone and we’ve forgotten our pain, are how we take back our story. Sometimes the writer’s block on a Monday morning feels totally insurmountable and writing is like swimming through treacle and your brain simply can’t find its usual connections. On those days you have to brute force it; on those days you need to aim for Gabriel’s massive head and hope Eberechi Eze’s holy right foot will clean up the scraps. When the pain has faded and you hit the wall, this is all you have left. One step, one word, one in-swinging set-piece. And then the net ripples, and you hit publish, and those 144 words have turned into 2,079, and it’s done. Win without feeling, win without pain. Win.

The coffee button.