Patchwork fury
Bring it, over and over again.
There wasn’t even time for another kick.
In the National Portrait Gallery, there’s an enormous painting I enjoy called The House of Commons, 1833. It’s more than five metres wide and three tall, and it’s one of those pieces you can stand close to and lose yourself in completely; it fills every part of your vision if you let it. It took the artist, George Hayter, ten years to complete, and ten more to sell.
Many of the most famous portraits of the Commons depict something resembling a war scene; Hayter’s own The Trial of Queen Caroline 1820 has a quiet kineticism to it, a sense of barely-concealed chaos as hundreds of very serious men decide if another man should be allowed to have a divorce. Then there’s The Anti-Slavery Society Convention 1840, a painting of that monumental moment Britain abolished the slave trade: the eyes are drawn to the stance of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and the quiet watchfulness of Henry Beckford, a former slave who watches on in the foreground, unspeaking. There is energy to these paintings, a sense of movement that captures the magnitude of the decisions being made.
The House of Commons, 1833 is, in contrast, quiet. None of the hundreds of MPs seem to be speaking; they’re shaped as if in conversation, but it’s hard to tell if any of their mouths are open. Hayter included himself in the foreground, half-shadowed and silent, an unseen observer to the most powerful congregation of men in the world. And this is how you feel too, looking in. As if you’re somehow violating the privacy of 375 people at once; the sense of intimacy, for something so grandiose, is profound.
It’s also unsettling. These men have changed the course of democracy forever: they’ve just passed the Reform Act, which extended voting rights to upper-middle class landowners (and explicitly excluded women for the first time). In that way, the portrait is most powerful for what it doesn’t include, the things that tug at the edges of your senses as it overwhelms them. The quiet, powerful stoicism of this apparently magnificent assembly is, of course, platformed by the unseen but staggering suffering of their empire, of their colonies of slaves and subjects. Out of frame, a few well-connected women hide in the attic and watch on through a ventilation shaft in the ceiling. Across the country, the vast majority of working class men and women live their lives unchanged, still decades (or a century) away from voting. Hayter was renowned for his pomposity and grandiose ideas: this is a painting which presents the seat of colonial power as quiet and organised and unflappable, an unemotional bubble of Serious Civility in an ocean of Barbaric Chaos. This is how power sees itself: cold and quiet and without the need to speak.
Yeah, I’m gunna do that thing. As we know, real moments of change do not happen in an airless vacuum but in rip-and-tear madness, desperation and flailing limbs. I want to see paintings that are honest, that depict truth. Go frame-by-frame and you’ll spot something new every time, a little story to obsess over, each of someone with their intentions worn clear: Martin Zubimendi throwing his leg into David Raya as he stretches to block and loses sight of the ball; Jurrien Timber moving with that alien speed that animates him in moments of danger to make a heroic, goal-saving lunge; Ben White and Timber again, who has somehow found his feet already and used them in two lightning paces to move back between the ball and the goal, throwing themselves in synchronicity to the ground; the little scrabble that follows, in which fate demands the ball roll inches away from Timber’s reaching foot and towards Emi Buendia; and last, but most crucially, the little one-foot gap that remains between Declan Rice and Zubimendi as they collapse towards the ball.
On reflection and two days withdrawn from the initial bitter anger, this final moment made me think two thoughts. The first: “wow, this goalmouth scrabble looks very slightly like one of those glorious Renaissance paintings of furious combat…shit, I haven’t seen any of those in person recently…wait, I have seen that Hayter painting of Parliament I really like, the one in which hundreds of politicians stand totally emotionless, I bet I can waste minutes of everyone’s time by connecting that to Arsenal losing 2-1 to Aston Villa via the most tenuous link imaginable. Onwards.”
The second was: “man, look how much they care.”
Sorry to interrupt - I’d love a moment more of your time.
Redstory took off in September, in one of the most exciting and rewarding months of my writing life yet. It’s a joy to write about Arsenal every week, even if things have slowed down (I’ve actually lost subscribers this month so far, lol, but that’s what I get for writing weird nonsense.)
But some of you have pledged paid subscriptions to me anyway, which means the world. I’m deciding today, as a small Christmas / birthday present to myself, to collect those pledges, and turn paid subscriptions on.
This is not a paywall. If you would like to continue reading Redstory for free, you can do so indefinitely. I have no intentions of ever paywalling this blog. If I have to start thinking about this as a product to sell I think I’ll throw up; I’d much prefer to consider it as a sponsorship of sorts, if that’s okay with you. If you like my writing and would like to sponsor me to continue doing it, every subscription means more time and energy I can spend on my craft and less on scrabbling around desperately for money. But, I must stress again, it is entirely optional.
I turn thirty in exactly two weeks. I’ve only ever dreamed of writing and don’t know how to do much else, and I am fucking scared - the future doesn’t look too kind for my sort. I am not owed the privilege of writing as vocation and I know I am running out of time to earn it, but I see this as another small step. I promise to return your support with more effort, better prose, deeper research, and more feeling for the club we adore. I know recent entries have been a bit scattered and meandering, which is mostly a result of my need to prioritise paying work. Making Redstory a small and sustainable part of my professional life would be a dream come true, and would mean I could focus on making each entry a banger.
If you’re sick of subscriptions or would simply prefer to tip me whenever you can afford to, I’ll keep my coffee jar open and available. That will continue to be pay-what-you-want at or above £4, which is 40p more than the black coffee I’m sipping at my local as I write this (I can’t set it to £3.60, sadly). Subscriptions here will be £4.99, or £49.99 a year, which is pretty much as low as I can go and continue to take anything home after fees. There is a much higher ‘founder’ tier for those kind souls with the expendable income to support me further.
Thank you so much for considering it - and to those who have already offered me financial support, I am forever in your debt. I really hope to keep writing about Arsenal for many years and will attempt to continue to, even if it never makes financial sense.
Yours,
T x
I felt compelled to write about the painterly final scrabble because I don’t think this game generated many other stories worth telling. The league’s best team rocked up at one of the most difficult grounds in the country, to face the country’s most in-form side, with a depleted and exhausted squad trudging away from one of the most emotionally intense weeks they’ll have ever faced, and only succumbed to weariness with the final kick - that’s not a great headline. So instead we pretend like this says anything at all about Arsenal the collective, Arsenal the mentality, Arsenal the juggernaut, and fiddle with the little stories of Eberechi Eze and Viktor Gyokeres.
Let us start by acknowledging just how good Aston Villa are. Since Matty Cash scored their first goal of the season to draw at the Stadium of Light, they have won every single game - excluding an incongruous defeat to that red circus who currently hold the trophy. Difficult as it is to admit, Unai Emery has shaped an immense energy at Villa Park that is almost impossible to deny when whipped into its claret-and-blue hurricane. Ask Paris Saint-Germain or Manchester City. This is a side capable of putting the world’s absolute best to the sword, of ripping through defences with the dancing legs of Morgan Rodgers or the telescopic power of Andre Onana or the cut-throat clarity of Ollie Watkins that has, admittedly, deserted him of late. But Villa are special because Emery has engineered a collective that is so much more than its pieces. A man usually depicted as a faux intellectual, a pure but clumsy tactician, Emery at Villa has grown to understand a club’s best weapon is its heart - and it might be time to start admitting he failed in north London because Arsenal failed to reveal its heart to him. It’s taken a different Spaniard to pull ours, muddied and beaten but still beating, from the dirt.
Villa’s superpower is not just in their technical talent, which is immense but hardly superior to say, the Bournemouth side they smashed 4-0 weeks ago, but in the colossal feeling Emery has whipped up in Birmingham. He has matched his style, a too-and-fro, blow-for-blow freneticism that’s more akin to a swordfight than a football game, to the noise and belief his faithful respond with. Every attack is met with a roar that matches its pace and purpose and elevates it - keeping that storm at bay for ninety minutes is near-impossible.
But as each Villa game swings on this attack-to-block rhythm, so too do their seasons. When the energy starts to splutter the team fades with it. Emery delivered some of Arsenal’s greatest-ever winning runs but also its lowest moments in decades. The pendulum is a feature, not a bug. And when voices in the crowd grow hoarse we expect this Villa side to fall away, to tire, and for their victory here to be more relevant to Manchester City’s title chances than their own; that Arsenal meet them in December, twice, when the feeling is up, is a cruel twist of fate.
Next, let us acknowledge the immensity of the task Arsenal are attempting. Defeating Manchester City in the race for a Premier League title has been successfully accomplished once so far this decade, and only because they finally imploded. Last year was the first time since 2017 they’ve looked anything less than eventual champions, excluding the bizarre COVID-19 season in which they scored 102 goals but somehow lost nine games. In 2018/2019, Liverpool finished on 97 points and still lost. This is a gargantuan, state-owned juggernaut the likes of which English football has never, ever seen, and in comparison every other club, superpowers and all, should be considered David, not Goliath. Clubs like Villa, Liverpool and Arsenal need to draw on immense reserves of emotional capital to compete because that is the only resource City cannot buy, or (allegedly) cheat to buy - but is also a resource that ebbs and wanes, that cannot be pumped like oil directly into Manchester. Eventually, as Liverpool found the year after they finally triumphed, it simply runs out.
There will be many tactical and technical reasons Arsenal lost to Villa, but I think the primary ‘intangible’ is they simply ran out of this resource in a moment Villa’s reserves are high. Piero Hincapie awkwardly flapping a ball out for a throw-in was not a reflection of his technical ability but that he was knackered. If you’ve ever played the game, you know exhaustion - physical and emotional - is rarely evident in how much you run, but in how heavy your feet become, how they stop listening to what your brain is saying, and how every touch seems to make a violent clanging sound as the ball goes careening off in another direction. The big, immense moments of exertion and energy are still easy to find; the delicate bits, that require speed and control, totally collapse. The first sign of fatigue is a heavy touch.
That fatigue is both emotional, after last week’s cavalcade of hat-tricks and tifos and conquering of world-beaters, and physical, as all Arsenal’s injuries pile up in the same area again. Arsenal are best when they are unchanged, when rhythm builds and the spine of Raya-Saliba-Gabriel-Zubimendi-Rice-Saka can steamroll through opponents. Two of that spine are gone and two are run into the ground and Saka is playing with a revolving door of associates that have made fluency a distant dream. Am I aiming for Trossard or Martinelli or Eze at the far post? Is it Gyokeres or Merino I need to find? Is Odegaard or Eze inside me, Timber or White outside? And all those associates are finding their way back to fitness or form, or playing different roles week-to-week. As the winter rolls on, Arsenal are looking more and more like a patchwork quilt, stitched together from whatever Arteta has lying around.
That’s in part why easy conclusions like ‘Eze can’t defend’ or ‘Gyokeres is bad’ are premature. The former has been playing at ten for a month; the latter has barely played at all. The desire to draw easy stories from such a dagger is natural but I think obscures the reality: a half-fit collective almost escaped from a hellish away ground with a point after going blow-for-blow across ninety minutes. Every period of Emery-induced onslaught was met with a response of Arsenal’s own - in the end, the pendulum simply settled with one side.
I opened this blog with talk of change happening in moments of violence, not quiet: but ultimately I don’t think anything much has changed at all. Arsenal are still the best team in the country, and only seem to lose games by the one-foot gap between Rice and Zubimendi, or the outrageous power of Dominic Szoboszlai’s right foot. We have lost once since August. If we thought this would be pretty, we haven’t been paying attention: this patchwork Arsenal is not the exception but the norm. All those pieces will, together, need to find whatever compelled Timber to throw himself around the box, to have David Raya slapping the ground in furious frustration, and to use it, over and over, without it running out. The feeling, in the face of an unfeeling power, is the edge.
In 1834, a year after the session depicted in Hayter’s painting, the House of Commons burned down and was lost.
To beat Manchester City across thirty-eight games will require not the quiet, cold calculation of the Etihad or perhaps 375 silent MPs deciding the destinies of subjects they will never meet, but an endless roar of fury, the pulsing of a dirt-smattered heart that, now unburied, refuses to die.
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