We’re stood in the smoking area, he and I, and we’re watching a little screen. Just across the water, across the Albert Bridge that glows in the river below it, across our city just a mile or two, it happens. Willian Estevao slides in at the back post and scoops a low cross into the net. 90+5’. He sprints to the corner as the boardings at Stamford Bridge clap and boom and I can hear the noise both through the little TV and, I imagine, carried across the bridge in the night.
And he looks at me, my childhood friend whom I infected with the Arsenal when we were six, and I look at him, and in that look we share something, an understanding that we both hold a damp little flutter of knowledge that neither of us dare vocalise for fear of cursing ourselves or our team, of sticking pins into the knee of Martin Odegaard’s voodoo doll, or simply revealing ourselves as naïve reactionaries carried away on the winds of two pints and a last-minute winner. So we keep quiet.
And of course it is only October, and of course state-owned superpowers are just warming up, and of course anything can happen. Even the deepest squads run out of knees eventually. Even the best attacks can exhaust their ideas. A draw here, a loss there - the pendulum of the game swings and it can all be erased in a fortnight or less.
But still, I can’t help but feel like league football generally reverts to the mean. Over 38 games it’s very rare for the best group not to emerge victorious. Liverpool had the best last year. Arsenal were extraordinary in the two years before that but just not as extraordinary as the team assembled with the sovereign wealth of a nation by the greatest manager in history - and for all the youthful bluster and ferocious momentum and earth-shaking power generated by Reiss Nelson 90+8’, football did what it does, and reverted to the mean.
I tried to put all this in the look I gave my friend in the smoking area as Estevao was buried beneath blue bodies and I could tell the glance he returned contained the same. Our little half-smiles were mirrors. Just don’t actually say it, don’t speak. Because to say it, to say what we are both coming to quietly believe, would be to ruin it. To believe any story is to give it power over you and that, I think, is what everyone is so scared of: the terror of our stories unravelling.
So do not say it. Don’t. Do not, under any circumstances, say that Arsenal are the best football team in the country at the moment, and very possibly the world. Don’t. Let’s ignore it for now, for as long as we can. And certainly don’t say that football usually reverts to the mean. That would be very dangerous indeed.
So my friend and I stay quiet. Instead we look at each other and we go back inside and somewhere, just a mile or two away, Stamford Bridge roars all the things we dare not say.
Every week I go out for coffee and write Redstory. If you enjoy this little blog, it’d be awesome if you helped me justify the time I take to write it.
You can always tell when things are going well for Arsenal. It’s the quiet. Everyone stops talking and waits for the next opportunity to jump, the next story to tell. After West Ham there’s simply not much to say - a very, very good football team defeated a much lesser side by playing football much better than them. I think in common parlance they call this professionalism.
So we’re left with the scraps and that portentous feeling, somewhere deep in the gut, that we’re all holding something we’re not allowed to say. In the vacuum that’s left we try to tell other, smaller stories. Viktor Gyokeres has not scored in six games, despite throwing his weight around like he personally holds opposing centre-halves accountable for his mini-drought. Martin Odegaard set an unfortunate record of being the first player in history to be substituted in the first half in three consecutive games. Declan Rice scored to a cavalcade of boos and then stared down his old supporters in a hilarious display of barely concealed distaste. They have forgotten, I suppose, the European trophy he delivered to them as captain; £105m was simply not enough recompense, and I do not begrudge them their anger. Logic has no place in fandom.
Martin Zubimendi again deconstructed both another defence and another narrative. We are just weeks removed from the circulation of the idea that starting Rice, Zubimendi and Mikel Merino together means Mikel Arteta has decided not to win the game, and yet this week he did the total opposite: Rice as a six flanked by Ebere Eze and Martin Odegaard (two players with ‘CAM’ next to their names on popular apps, a signifier for ‘attack’ and therefore ‘win’) but it was not until Zubimendi arrived (‘CDM’, meaning ‘cannot create chances’) that Arsenal began to find routine ways through the low block. It was his pass that sent Eze through to create the first, and his clip that generated the penalty. He is a player who improves Arsenal everywhere, from rest defence to build-up to the final third, a player who silently generates territory like he carries field tilt around in his pocket. As with most players of his kind, his value will only be recognised in its absence.
And then we’re left with Gyokeres, the industrious enigma. I love him for his contradictions alone. A man who looks like a Scandinavian model, pointed chin and sharp jawline and perfect hair, is in reality a scrapping, scraping fury, a bumper-car blur of limbs and thrown shoulders. He looks like a flat-track bully who’s finally been asked to pick on kids his own size. And he is fighting not just the physicality of his massive new opponents but also the stories we have wrapped around him: this is the Gerd Müller Trophy winner, the most free-scoring forward in world football, not a man at all but a big red button that unleashes goals like tactical nukes. He is the missing piece, apparently, because we all settled on the idea that Arsenal do not win trophies because their nines aren’t good enough: rather than the truth, which is that Kai Havertz was on track to score 25 goals last year before his hamstring exploded, and Arsenal were left without any nines at all. Stodgy, boring Arsenal have now scored more goals than Liverpool’s fabled collection of mega-talent. It doesn’t matter who hits the net as long as it’s bulging, and as long as Viktor Gyokeres has four long arms wrapped around him that might otherwise be grappling with Bukayo Saka, he is making a marked and significant difference to Arsenal’s chances of winning football games. There was commentary after the Newcastle United game that it stood as proof Gyokeres was not good enough, Olympiakos the same; Arsenal won both. This is a collective sport, an associative sport, and if a collection of eleven players consistently wins games, and deserves to, all eleven should enjoy credit for their part in the whole.
That said, I would like to see Gyokeres just absolutely fucking break the net a couple of times in the near future. Call it stress relief. I think he needs it as much as us.
We’ll have to wait at least twelve days first. Twelve days for the quiet to build and that story to fester in our guts. I wonder when we’ll start to believe. Perhaps that week in late November, after the NLD and Stamford Bridge? Or perhaps we’ll want to wait until January: Liverpool at home, Manchester United. Or perhaps we’re all so scared of our stories unravelling, perhaps we’re so conditioned to the anxiety of the comedown that we’ll want to wait until the mathematics make it certain before we start to enjoy ourselves.
The friend I watched the Chelsea game with fell in love with Arsenal because, when we were six years old, I would not shut the fuck up about Dennis Bergkamp and Robert Pires and Patrick Viera. We were out on Saturday celebrating his thirtieth birthday. When Arsenal last won the league, we were nine. We have never seen an Arsenal team like this. We have both resolved to celebrate it, all of it, the routine 2-0s and the Gabriel last-minute headers and the scrapping and the scraping and the painful and the joyous. All of it. Just don’t say it. Not a word. Not yet.
Magic ball from Bergkamp to Patrick Veiera, and the captain fittingly gets the goal that creates history. I was 13 then, and I can still picture the stills from that moment as clearly as if it were yesterday.
And yes, since then, this is the best group of Arsenal players we’ve assembled. But don’t say it too loudly. Let’s just slip quietly into that gentle night.
That was an very pleasurable read Tom, I really enjoyed that, thanks a lot.