Winter arc
We run in void.
The point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.
Mikel Arteta is a man obsessed with his team’s demons. He arrived at Arsenal like a young Max von Sydow, a pastor of the Good Church of Winning, parachuted in to dispel a darkness that had festered in the club’s heart. He expunged the grotesquery as it writhed, but every year it has returned in a new form: and every year since he has changed his approach to combat it, as if playing whack-a-mole with a ghost.
There was Southampton in the first title run, that late-year embarrassment which peeled back the bravado from the young pretenders and revealed them as desperate kids; the year after a bigger, stronger Arsenal smashed them home and away. There was Manchester City of course, the unstoppable force that Arteta has since met with an immovable object. Newcastle United, last year’s bullies, have already been felled. Fragility has been met with depth, illegality with perfect discipline - the pressure now is immense because every hole has seemingly been plugged, and yet the ghosts remain. We’re all waiting for another leak to spring.
Fulham and their mid-block was such a spectre. Craven Cottage last year was one of a series of draws so mind-numbingly dull they have all blurred together. It inspired this huge breakdown from Billy on Arsenal’s lack of definitive box presence and recurring struggles with breaking down a particular type of defence. It was a game emblematic of everything Arsenal suffered through last year, and yet here we are. Another demon vanquished.
I’ll let someone smarter handle the details, but it’s striking to me that Arsenal allowed many more shots than last year - nine to two - but took more in return - 16 to 12. A little less suffocation, a little more action, please. Things have changed just a little, but meaningfully. Instead of Kai Havertz vacating the box to combine, we have two incredible full-backs, playing on their correct sides, dovetailing with their wingers. Instead of horseshoeing around we’re allowing Ebere Eze to turn in midfield, drive, and lose the ball in pursuit of central access: a gamble that concedes a transition almost every time it fails, but creates enormous threat when it comes off. And instead of a vacuum in the six-yard box we have Viktor Gyokeres, a furious blonde maelstrom throwing his elbows around and planting his feet, bouncing the ball to and from his attackers and scrabbling to turn and snap away shots in his desperate pursuit of a goal. Criticism will come his way, again, but to me he endears himself just because I’ve never seen a man want to score so badly: and not in a head down, defeatist way, but with a deeply angry determination you know won’t fade until it’s done.
All this I think has combined to present an Arsenal that’s a little more conventional, a team who are seriously leaning into their greatest strength: the fact they’re much, much better at football than their opponents in every single position on the pitch. You can chat about the 1%, the fine margins, the lucky bounces, set pieces and tweaks and luck, but if you are finding Bukayo Saka alone with Ryan Sessegnon five times a half, you’ll probably win the game. And so we did.
Of course there will always be a place for the crazy. Watching Riccardo Calafiori feels like a fever dream, a hallucinatory experience in which positions are suggestions and a person’s ability to play football changes moment to moment. Every time he kicks the ball a roulette wheel spins: red, and the best thing you’ve ever seen happens; black, a poor bloke thirty rows back has his pie smashed out of his hand by a small ball-shaped comet. His Takehiro Tomiyasu-type centre-forward run in the first half was inspired and left Joachim Anderson backpeddling and befuddled: what the fuck is a polar bear doing in Arlington Texas? What the fuck is a polar bear doing finishing a half-chance like that? What the fuck? And then later the polar bear takes a curling snapshot from his right paw, and then cracks a Van Basten-style volley from his left. This guy is a centre-back? What the hell is going on? Calafiori is totally mental, a walking juxtaposition of grace and mania, the kind of player I will point at as proof of my belief the best football players are like great dramatic characters, balling barrels of contradictory ideals, literary vehicles for Hegelian dialectics come to life. Lord someone stop me, for I feel the Peter Drury rising in my heart.
There are so many more ingredients to this exorcism. Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka are the best players of their kind on the planet, and I think that’s beginning to become basically indisputable, even to the Twitter warriors - including them as a footnote feels both unfair and fitting, because neither have any surprises left to deliver. They’re just impossibly good, every week. Jurrien Timber is unstoppable right now. Gabriel, William Saliba and David Raya look about as likely to concede as they do fall asleep on the football pitch, which might be the only way they actually allow a shot on target. Arteta has dispelled the demons by creating his own: a relentless, ruthless winning machine, a monster that will take its ugly vengeance with teeth, curses and the pointy end of Leandro Trossard’s knobbly knee. All that’s left to know is if another ghost will rise, or if this iteration, patched together from the hurts of the past, is finally free.
I am immensely grateful to the 17 (!) readers who have brought me coffee so far, and the others who have pledged subscriptions, despite me not even turning them on. I can’t tell you how rewarding it feels to earn a little money from my creative outlet; I am immensely grateful.
I hope to never paywall this work. If you’d like to help me justify that decision, you can buy me coffee here. Thank you!
It’s mid-October, and the boys are deep in their winter arcs. If you’re not sure what that means, congratulations on the unblemished state of your brain.
A winter arc is a period of (usually masculine) ritual self-flagellation performed by the #lads in penance for a summer of failure and heartache. As the sky turns dark, so do we: we disappear into the shadows, into the world of barbells and total focus, to exorcise our demons. When the sun returns we shall emerge, rippling with muscle and new life: or, more likely, a little chubbier and more regretful, but thankful that such a stupid idea is over.
Of course ‘winter arc’ is just another result of the internet’s propensity for flattening trends to fit inside cardboard boxes. Ideas must be branded so they can spread, so we can identify with and fit them into our own, personal brands. I still find the winter arc enticing. Perhaps its the lingering school-era sensation of September being an era of renewal; perhaps it’s the weather getting tough and our desire to get tough with it. For me, it was a late-summer epiphany that I still had demons left to conquer, and the encroaching terror of a new decade.
So you find me, dear reader, deep in my winter arc. I have resolved to lose the last of my unwanted weight, a relic of an old haunting (halfway there), to dive into big, ambitious projects at SCOUTED (underway), to lay the groundwork for my first big running race next year (fittest I’ve ever been but not fit enough, yet) and to turn Redstory into a consistent creative outlet that might, one day, help alleviate the onrushing financial disaster facing every creative professional on the planet and certainly me (will need your help with this one, but so far, not too bad).
Every year I read Haruki Murakami’s ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’, a short memoir about fitness and creativity that in my opinion holds the secret to life, as I best understand it so far. (I have now mentioned Murakami and ‘winter arc’ in the same column, which might paint me as a certain type to some corners of the internet, and to those corners I say: suck my ass. We contain multitudes.) “I run in void,” Murakami writes; “Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.” Murakami draws parallel lines between the rhythmic, meditative act of striking the pavement a few thousand times a day with his vocation as a writer. Both, he says, require a quiet of the mind, a quiet that feeds endless repetition: “To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.” It’s a story about that rhythm more than anything, a rhythm that has soundtracked the author’s life since he began running at the age of 32.
I’m obsessed with my winter arc because (it silences the terror of being alive and the sting of regret) I feel the rhythm. Each repetition - each strike of the keyboard or pavement, with my goals clear in mind, bright pictures in the void - feels like a small miracle. These small victories make the big ones, like looking in the mirror and thinking oh shit, or publishing this newsletter every Monday even when I think it’s a bit rubbish, as I do this and every week, feel monumental. Forgive me the foray into self-help territory, my point is thus: the boring slam of each repetition may not, itself, yield much joy; the little movement it represents towards a distant mountain is purpose, purpose in the quiet, and that rhythm I think unlocks something quite special.
Last year I wrote Exorcism and announced “there are no demons left in Arsenal.” I was wrong - the biggest demon remained, and remains. This is a team born and bred to win, raised from the pits of hell with one purpose like the fighting Uruk-hai, and who win almost every week: and so far it has all added up to nothing. The summit remains untouched.
There’s not much joy in Arsenal at the moment, even though we’re the best team in the country (shh), and on top of the league. Our run to Christmas is full of games against gnarly mid-table opposition, games that will not feel dramatic or monumental but that each represent a repetition, another step against the pavement. We are, you might say, deep in our winter arc. Each of these games will feel about as glamorous as a Monday evening squat session, but all wins count the same.
If we cannot generate the loud and furious sense of momentum of years past, if the ghosts are still too much and the prospect of another emerging dampens our spirits, if the state-owned Norwegian gargantua hounding us down feels inevitable, I hope we can instead lose ourselves in the quiet. Another repetition, another small piece of movement, over and over, until the mountain pulls into focus. Fulham, 1-0, done. Palace, next. The rhythm takes over. Do you feel it? We run in void, void void void, until the sun returns.
Love the build up to the finish!
That was a great read, thanks Tom.