The river

A response to Forest and the poison of apathy

Can you hear that? There’s a roar, coming from somewhere far away, like the sound of a distant river. It grows louder. It is not, of course, the River Trent, which is a peaceful thing most days, a flat grey carpet that snakes through the south of Nottingham and divides the City Ground from the rest of the city proper, from Beeston and Lenton and Market Square. No, the roar is coming from the City Ground itself, from the banks of the Trent, from inside that royal-red cathedral that holds the names of its heroes. It’s the sound of thirty-thousand screaming their avatar towards a rich and gilded scalp. It’s the raucous, gleeful pandemonium of a crowd who know they might, today, see the king beheaded. It’s the terrifying communal avalanche of noise that follows Arsenal everywhere and is only growing, game by game, week by week.

Of all the talk of bottling and mentality and cowardice, another truth is going under-discussed: ruining Arsenal’s party is now among the most coveted rewards in the Premier League. That roar, that engulfed the City Ground from the moment they knew a gatecrash might be on, is not normal. It’s the sound of a crowd who remember 2023, who have seen Taiwo Awoniyi twist the knife, and know the joy of stomping on broken dreams. Of course Forest want to win for Forest’s sake, too, but let’s be honest: the threat of West Ham United picking up five more points than this superbly talented group stings only a little. This incentive is shared by every team in the league now, from Wolves to Forest to Manchester United, and it represents another wall Arsenal must run through.

Arsenal are at a huge disadvantage: they are trying to dethrone a perennial champion who have never faced this obstacle at all. Manchester City’s Premier League dynasty was built on three superpower pillars: the staggering talent and influence of Pep Guardiola, which remains undeniable; the alleged illegality with which they pumped the endless resources of the world’s second-richest petrostate into the club without consequence; and the total void of feeling they have constructed their decade of dominance inside. Long have weaker sides been accused of ‘rolling over’ for Guardiola’s red carpet. This was never just an expression of hopelessness but the consequence of an emotional vacuum: it’s not that nobody thinks they’re good enough to beat Manchester City, it’s that nobody gives a shit enough to try. Saturday’s Manchester derby was the first time in many years that game has been injected with City’s anathema, passion, and the noise tore them apart.

Arsenal will never, ever share this gift of lassitude. We may wish for it, we may wish nobody cared, that they’d just roll over and let us stomp our way to another title, and another, but the truth is no matter how enormous the gap in quality between Arsenal and the rest of the league becomes, they’ll never stop trying to kill us: we hold a proud and well-earned place in the complex web of hatred and rivalry that binds the Premier League together, and makes it one of the most special sporting competitions in the history of the world, and that Manchester City have managed to detach themselves from near-entirely.

As we move closer to a title, the noise is only going to grow louder and our opponents more fierce. To match it, to overcome a handicap City have long-since purchased relief from, Arsenal have historically brought a terrific amount of noise of their own. A sense of destiny, of narrative, a great tidal wave of belief that sucks the ball towards the net with more ferocity the further the clock gets past ninety. Disconcerting is not the smattering of draws that have tarnished this campaign, nor the inability to pull away entirely, but the big fat hole where this noise used to be: against Nottingham Forest, Arsenal had no answer on the pitch, but no emotional answer, either, and that was most worrying of all.

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The thing with this passion, this fight, this ethereal sense of destiny I have loosely labelled ‘noise’, is that it’s largely generated by attacking the other team. Arsenal are indisputably the best team in the world when they do not have the football, but sadly you generally need the football to score a goal.

There are attempts, individually, to generate noise. Viktor Gyokeres is continually endearing because of the desperate ways he throws his muscled limbs at opponents like a thrashing fish caught on a line, but the cuteness of effort alone is beginning to sour. Kai Havertz needed time, Mikel Merino needed time, but these were players who had played in the Premier League before they reached Arsenal and softened the physical level with a tonic of guile Gyokeres lacks. He is all power, but that power has met its match in the astonishing speed and strength of the Average Premier League Defender. His plight, I think, is more about them than it is him. His touch looks loose because he has less time, his feet look slow because there is always someone to reach the ball before him, and whereas his bumper-car bullying used to blast lesser opponents away, now he looks like an angry child uselessly smacking the fed-up parent carrying him up the stairs to bed.

Gyokeres’ plight is analogous for just how brutal the Premier League has become. The compactness of the table is not a random bug of this season, but a reflection of twenty teams who are now arguably better than 99% of football teams ever have been. The league’s worst side by far has Joao Gomes, Jorgen Strand Larsen, Mateus Mane. What Arsenal are attempting to achieve is win the league at its technical and physical peak, and the level they’ve reached to lose once since August should not be undervalued because they’re doing it dispassionately. There is a dangerous rumour going around, the sense of which is becoming acute, that Mikel Arteta has decided this dispassion is key, that the most important of City’s pillars was the third, the void, rather than the alleged cheating or the genius, and that he thinks he can engineer a void on the pitch by building a defensive unit so robust, so suffocating, that passion is denied the oxygen it needs to burn. But the only side to ever disrupt City’s dominance did it while kicking and screaming, blasting heavy metal over the loudspeakers of their hearts, the noise of the Kop a hurricane symphony. Trying to calculate your way to the Premier League when you are not Manchester City is a fool’s game, because hatred cannot be defeated with good rest-defence; it can only be met in kind.

Let’s not allow this rumour to obscure the truth of who Mikel Arteta is. This is a man who blasted the noise of the Kop through a training session. He drew a fucking lightbulb on a fucking whiteboard and invited the RAF to talk to his team about courage. He removed the tunnel at the Emirates and introduced Louis Dunford’s ‘The Angel’ to the crowd. To suggest, because Arsenal are better at defending than they are the opposite, that Arteta is not a man acutely attuned to passion, to the deeply human elements of the game, that he has decided to coldly ‘calculate’ his way to a title, is nonsense. This is my football club. I fucking love this football club.

I would suggest Arsenal are suffering from the liminal space between belief and expectation. This is no longer an underdog story, unfair as that may seem. The threat of disaster is beginning to outweigh the joy of the chase. Arsenal are dropping points almost like they understand they need to be threatened to feel again. Thankfully, there is a tonic; Arsenal need a blockbuster moment, a spark to light the fuse, and it could come at any moment. And there is a choice to be made here, too. We in the crowd can reject expectation and try to fall in love again. We can say no, we’re not going to let one-hundred-and-eighty minutes of turgid attacking turn our desire for deliverance into a cavalcade of moaning and groaning. That kind of icky ambience, the noise of expectation, will be swept away by a roar that might be mistaken for a river, and you can bet that roar is a-coming down the hill.

Arsenal need a sound of their own. They need a hurricane, a heavy-metal symphony, an orchestra of belief. It is on the players and the manager and the fans to build that noise in symbiosis again. In silence, only apathy wins.