Detonation

Late-night commiserations

As I begin this, it’s 10:20pm. I’m moving my hands across the keyboard purely so they may not scroll, so they may not shovel endless flashing comments into my eyes. I don’t know what to do or what to say but I know for certain writing will help, it always has, even if the words I leave here are embarrassing and childish and reveal me for what I am: a thirty year-old man who just spent ten minutes lying on the floor in the dark because a football team conceded a goal.

Fuck it. Here’s how I feel, right now, having just risen from the ground to my keyboard: I feel it’s over. I feel there is no way Arsenal or Mikel Arteta recover from this. I feel there may still be something nice in our near future but it won’t be the Premier League and it certainly won’t be the all-conquering shower of trophies we knew was unlikely but also knew, or were beginning to believe, this team’s quality deserved. And I feel that way because throwing a two-goal lead to (currently) the worst Premier League side in history is as clear and obvious a signal I can imagine that quality no longer matters. There are no tactical tweaks or clever rotational tricks or set piece routines available to fix what has just snapped in this team. It doesn’t matter. You can be perfect, you can hold opponents to infinitesimal amounts of xG, you can field tilt the absolute shit out of them, but analytics and counter pressing and rest defence and all the rest simply cannot make victors of a group terrified of becoming so.

I know what you’re thinking right now, I’m thinking it too: the last blog here was literally a rallying cry for us all to ‘enjoy’ this shit, to live and love every moment of this historic campaign. We’ve just moved five points clear, you hypocrite! There’s a final to come and, whisper it, perhaps two more! Look, two weeks ago I was an innocent, naive child. I did not know the horrors. I thought going to battle would be like the stories and songs; I thought it’d be over by Christmas; I knew not how it would feel to see that shell falling towards the trench, or to watch David Raya drop it in the fucking box. And besides, this blog is meant to capture the Arsenal story which, right now, is in the fucking mud. On these pages I am not a journalist or an analyst and I’m certainly not going to do that pathetic thing tactico people do on Twitter where they pretend to be stoic and unmoved by the game they claim to love and that they have defeated Bias, the final enemy all Super Smart Football People must overcome on their way to Ascended Objectivity. No, I feel like ass, and the wonderful, awful thing with football is it stops you thinking all smarty and using words good be well hard when team make sad.

But seriously, I think the belief has gone out of me this quickly because I thought the Arsenal that would compete these coming months would have, at least, the same character of the Arsenal we’ve watched so far. I believed, truly, that the big emotional bomb that has sat in our club’s heart for years had finally been defused, and now it’s just gone off, and left a monstrous mushroom cloud lingering over Wolverhampton. I must admire the Hitchcockian use of tension. We’d seen the bomb under the table but we did not know it was a bomb at all; and so we have been delivered both suspense and surprise, a kind of temporal narrative switcharoo: oh, that’s what all these draws meant. That’s the heaviness that’s been sitting on me. I wasn’t a blip or a tactical tweak away from being fixed. It was all leading to this, this awful reveal: that Arsenal haven’t changed at all, that the character we thought had grown past her flaws could still succumb to them, that we’ve been watching a tragedy all along. As Philippe Auclair said after the game: “system teams are more prone to collective collapse.” What happens to the machine built for winning when it realises it’s terrified of achievement?

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I think correcting this for Sunday is the biggest challenge in Mikel Arteta’s career so far. I think winning the league - shit, anything - after this will be a miracle. I know that’s crazy. I know, I know. But that is how I feel, right now, as I approach midnight on this Wednesday, when the wind howls outside like a laughing wolf, me, a grown man who still remembers the taste of his carpet. I know I will feel differently in the morning. Already it’s beginning to fade.

It echoes: second again, olé olé, the joyful roar of a crowd who will be buying Championship tickets next season but have their schadenfreude scalp so who cares. I’ve mostly found that chant quite funny, because it is sung largely by fans who would cut their own arms off to get even the faintest sniff of second place. But then the dagger, the words that have actually burrowed under my skin despite my attempts to keep them out: same old Arsenal, always cheating, they sing, as Manchester fucking City close in. Tonight two goals struck David Raya’s net in the same week two drones alleged to belong to the RSF hit primary schools in South Kordofan.

The world would rather they won it, because then they wouldn’t have to feel anything: and after tonight, I’m beginning to understand Arsenal would prefer that, too. Perhaps it’s for the best. Perhaps football now is about shrinking away from anything that might cause us to confront ourselves. Perhaps it’s about ease and frictionless entertainment and soft ideas that slip into us and make us feel warm and passive. Why not? That’s everything else. The warmth has come for everything. Let’s just take the easy way out.

T