Last laugh
Hahah. Hahhaa. Hhahaha
In May 2022, Arsenal lost 2-0 at St James’ Park. The defeat killed the young team’s surprise pursuit of Champions League football - a prize they conceded to Tottenham Hotspur. The team that day featured an all-Hale-End frontline of Emile Smith Rowe, Bukayo Saka, and Eddie Nketiah. Nuno Taveres started at left-back. Granit Xhaka and Mohamed Elneny played in the double pivot.
Newcastle, meanwhile, had spent the year clawing away from the relegation zone in one of the Premier League’s greatest-ever escapes. They’d not won any of their first fourteen games of the season: the tenacity of their new coach had delivered them from certain relegation. That, and the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia believed to own almost $1trillion worth of assets (and today announced a deal to buy FC26 publishers Electronic Arts), had completed their purchase of the club in October of that season and, in January, sanctioned a move for a highly rated Brazilian midfielder called Bruno Guimaraes. He scored that day in May. Newcastle delighted in denying Arsenal their return to Europe. Hahah. Hahhaa. Hhahaha.
That afternoon, just three years ago, contained the genesis of two mirrored stories: a rivalry, perhaps, or something more star-crossed - a tale of two fated enemies who would bounce off each other at every passing interaction and change, just a bit, until each was made of little pieces of the other. Mikel Arteta was a young, talented coach tasked with turning a cruise liner back to shore while it was taking on water. Arsenal had spent years outside the top four, a once-unthinkable failure; the squad was old and thin and flimsy and full of dickheads. He’d delivered success quickly but now came the long, brutal slog towards sustained competitiveness. St James’ Park reminded us nothing would be linear.
Eddie Howe, meanwhile, was…a young, talented coach tasked with turning a cruise liner back to shore while it was taking on water. Newcastle United were terrible - truly, genuinely awful - when he arrived. The squad was thin and full of relics from a second-tier past. He pulled them away from disaster with astonishing speed and a bruiser mentality.
In the years since, both these coaches have delivered historic experiences to the clubs they have saved. Arteta has returned Arsenal to the pinnacle of European football. Howe has pulled Newcastle from relegation fodder to the Champions League. Both men have been on the cutting edge of football’s return to physicality and have shaped colossal teams around different ideals. Both have won domestic cup trophies but nothing else. Neither are perhaps celebrated quite enough for their achievements. Both have stone-faced their way through controversies because it was fairly easy to absolve them of guilt or responsibilities they both inarguably had: Arteta knowingly played an alleged rapist to the end of his contract; Howe has been totally unwilling to engage with the fact he’s employed by a nation state who torture and execute political dissidents and journalists as a hobby.
Between them, I think Arteta and Howe and their star-crossed relationship reflects football’s modernity perfectly. Youth and tactical idealism against the cold edges of capital; the naïve hope of a moral leadership crushed beneath the eternal machine of competition. And their teams, too, echo one-another. Both coaches have mixed a cocktail of power and guile that has bled into the rest of the Premier League and shaped it. Newcastle have become one of Arsenal’s trickiest opponents, a nemesis of sorts, because they are one of the few teams capable of matching their size and speed.
This fixture in particular, at St James’ Park, annually resembles a gladiatorial death-match more than a football game. When Arsenal have won it they’ve suffered through a barrage of crunching tackles and flying limbs. When they’ve lost, they’ve done so by margins that might’ve closed if they’d just thrown themselves around a little harder. The scrummage is a feature, not a bug. This is the pinnacle of the crunching Premier League in 2025, where the most technically gifted millionaire footballers on the planet settle scores with flying elbows and lurching legs. But playing the game as if it had a different sport's ruleset has the unfortunate side-effect of pushing the officials into the limelight, a development from which nobody ever emerges happy.
Three years ago - just three years - Arsenal couldn’t handle any of this blood and thunder. Entering the colosseum with a bunch of thin kids and ageing midfielders only had one outcome: change. When we think of the canon events in Arteta’s reign - being smashed by Manchester City, realising centre-backs could play at full-back, running out of players to attack Paris Saint-Germain with - St James’ Park looms large. The colosseum rewards only those who learn to survive it.
Just three years since that fateful day in 2022, Arsenal have learned not just how to survive but to dominate. Rip and tear: win while laughing, win while bloodied, win with a frenzied madness in the eyes. Are you not fucking entertained?
Every week I go out for coffee and write Redstory. If you enjoy these free columns, it’d be awesome if you subsidised the caffeine I need to write them.
The funhouse mirror between Mikel Arteta and Eddie Howe shows another pair of reflections: those of the Brazilian internationals who best embody their ideals. Bruno Guimaraes and Gabriel Magalhaes have defined the Howe/Arteta years, are both walking, bruising totems of their approaches to football. Fire and fury and finesse in two differently sized packages. When Gabriel went down under the feather’s weight of Nick Woltemade’s spindly arms, there was only one shape the story could take: redemption.
Gabriel whacked Woltemade in the face and the two had a little spat. Joelinton threw himself around like a wrecking ball impervious to regulations. Jamal Lascelles kindly helped Viktor Gyokeres with his iconic celebration by wrapping his hands over the Swede’s face and yanking. The ball smacked Gabriel’s arm in the box. Chaos, violence, mania: these are the rules of the colosseum.
But through it all, and in contrast to previous years, Arsenal played football, a lovely kind of football, full of domination and sweeping transitions. Bukayo Saka, still not fit, glided through the game and curved Arsenal around the pitch as the dogged Jurrien Timber, a man built for days like this, steamed past him over and over. Ebere Eze was a languid delight, full of creation and intent: around the box he moves forward as soon as he passes, such a simple but wonderful way of breaching the immovable lines so often arrayed against Arsenal. Watch the chance for Jurrien Timber: Eze jinks past a challenge, lays off the ball to Martin Zubimendi then darts into the box. It doesn’t matter where or how, the presence of another fast-moving body does things, unsettles, sows doubt. Watch the equaliser: Eze passes to Martin Ødegaard and then darts into the box, allowing Declan Rice the space to pick his spot. Mikel Merino, a man forged in the colosseum, a defensive midfielder whose very presence on the pitch means a lack of attacking intent, knew what it meant.
“The teams that are going to win the title,” Gary Neville said, after reacting to Merino’s goal with one word (“big”), “don’t just stop there. They go on and win the game.” So Arsenal did. And of course it was Gabriel. Of course. Redemption was the only way this could go.
Neville responded to Gabriel’s towering winner in the only way he knows: by making funny noises. Gary Neville is my favourite co-commentator. I know I’m not supposed to say that, because he says things Arsenal fans don’t like, and lacks any awareness of his biases. But that is precisely why I enjoy him so much: he is a channel for pure football, for idiocy and self-delusion, for total confidence in stupid opinions, and for the guttural, animal reaction we all felt as Fernando Torres rounded Victor Valdes: “OOOOooooooaaaaaaaaaargrggGggghhGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” Exactly. What else was there to say?
I am so tired of football’s pointless chase of objectivity. I am so tired of the ones and zeros, of the attempt to flatten the game into rules and consistency, datapoints and cold hard truths. You see it in VAR, in this pathetic attempt to pretend you can officiate football with objectivity and perfect accuracy. You see it in the reaction to VAR, in hilarious accusatory tweets of conspiracy and ineptitude (as Grace Robertson said this weekend: “VAR can never do what fans thought it would do: make their teams win more.”) I am so tired of us all pretending there is a single axiom at the heart of every game, some equation of truth that is impervious to the childish noise that makes football come alive: x always equals x, until someone throws an elbow.
Gary Neville is wrong, all the time, because he says what he feels, and sometimes what he feels can only be expressed in “oh. oh. oh.” And isn’t that beautiful? Did I not do the same in the pub at the weekend as Gabriel’s massive head emerged from the throng? Did you not? Why do you need commentators to be ‘correct?’ To describe what you’re seeing with perfect accuracy? What a cold, boring watch that would be.
Football is the closest thing we have today to gladiatorial combat. I wonder if Roman emperors and their subjects once had the same discussions we do. “The xG on Brutus getting his arm lopped off was 0.07, Maximus. He was objectively better today.” / “Nonsense, Lucius. You’re missing the fact Brutus is left-handed. Cassius is simply elite with a mace.”
Football is a story about stories and a story about people: of Eddie Howe and Mikel Arteta, influencing each other across the divide; of two Brazilians who have come to be walking, tackling, passing avatars of their mentors; of Gabriel buckling under the weight of nothing and then rising highest to nod home; of Gary Neville mumbling nonsense because he’s a confused mess of his feelings for Manchester United, his hatred for Arsenal and Liverpool, his obligation to tell the supposed truth, and his undeniable love of the theatric; and of me, writing imaginary dialogue about the Romans weeks after complaining other people’s opinions about Arsenal were wrong. It’s all such wonderful nonsense. The noise is the point.
Reflecting on Arsenal beating Newcastle makes me want to make only one more noise before we all move on, so if you’ll humour me:
Hahah. Hahhaa. Hhahahahahahahahaha.
It's good to know that when we win at the weekend I get to prolong the pleasure of it by reading you on a Monday
Very good. Love the comparison to Ancient Rome