Where we are

Morning.

I went back this morning to try and find something I thought I’d written in our big season preview back in August, but it must have been elsewhere. Maybe it was something I said on the podcast. I can’t recall exactly, and I don’t suppose it matters too much really. Basically though, my contention was that Arsenal stood a better chance of winning the title if the league was more competitive than a two-horse race. That if more teams were capable of taking points off each other, that would be better for us.

I still think that’s true, but obviously one of the side-effects of that is that you will end up on the wrong side of the occasional result yourselves. For me, that’s what happened at Villa Park. I can’t say that the manager will have prepared his team to expect defeat, but in all the meetings and discussions they’ve had, they must have touched on the possibility and how they’d need to react.

One thing that’s been very clear from Mikel Arteta is that nobody at Arsenal was getting carried away with being top of the table. Question after question about being title favourites, pundits and so on definitively declaring this to be our year after 10 games, he can’t control that. And I think we understand that in some cases there’s nothing quite like building something up for the purposes of narrative, because it makes knocking it down all the more enjoyable for them.

Arteta has been consistent in his messaging. We’re in the race, but there’s a long way to go and we have a lot of work to do. On Saturday he said:

It’s five months into the competition and so far we’ve coped. But we’re going to have to prove that we can cope again and again and again for another six months, that’s the level. If people think we are going to be in this moment with 10 points clear, I think we’re living in a different world.

I make him right there. I can’t tell anyone how to feel or react after a defeat like that. To lose to a goal that late is absolutely sickening, and I think there’s a kind of collective trauma among Arsenal fans – because we’ve come so close in recent seasons – which amplifies every setback to Nth degree. I understand it, I feel it to some extent, but I need to be able to rationalise things. Perhaps it’s a benefit of writing every day, it gives me an opportunity to think about it all in a (hopefully) relatively coherent way.

This morning I can look at the Premier League table, and I see an Arsenal side that remains top. Below that come Man City who have lost to Sp*rs, Brighton, Villa and Newcastle; Villa themselves have lost to Brentford, Crystal Palace and Liverpool. Our two defeats have come away from home, two difficult fixtures, but in early December we’re leading the pack having been to Anfield, Villa Park, Stamford Bridge, and St James’ Park, up there with the most difficult away games of the season. Objectively, not a bad place to be.

If Chelsea and Villa weren’t the most convincing performances, I think you have to take into account the absence of the best central defensive duo in the Premier League, and perhaps beyond. I don’t think we lose the game at Villa Park with Saliba and Gabriel, and I think we’d have won at Chelsea with those two playing. We need them back as soon as possible, and as well as others have done, they remain fundamental to our defensive solidity which is a big part of how we’ve been so effective as a team.

But the job is to get results regardless of who is absent, and I think this team has, for the most part, demonstrated a real capacity to do that. You don’t need me to list the names of everyone who has missed games this season through injury. It’d probably be quicker to list those who haven’t, and we put together an 18 game unbeaten run despite that. For me, that’s a kind of safety blanket for the loss on Saturday. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I don’t think it should be overlooked.

No doubt most of you will have noted at the time, or seen the video doing the rounds, of the Arsenal players reacting to the Villa goal after it went in. I think it’s quite instructive. On a visceral level, anyone who has played football or any competitive sport, understands what it’s like to suffer that kind of gut-punching moment. I hated the goal, obviously, but I quite liked (if that’s the right way of putting it), how much they felt it.

David Raya slamming the turf over and over and over; Piero Hincapie sinking to his knees and doing likewise. And Arteta afterwards admitting it was emotional, but sounding the right note, saying:

To lose it that way emotionally is very touching. You just feel that everything that you put in, it hasn’t been worth it. But it is worth it, because we will learn again from today and it will make us a better team again.

Does anyone doubt for a second that he’ll use this to energise his players, or that the players themselves will work harder and harder to avoid it? I remember Arsenal being accused of being too emotional in the past, and maybe a few years ago you might worry about how a moment like that could impact a team that was relatively young and still developing. I don’t have that concern this morning. It obviously hurt them, but not every punch is a knock-out blow.

No team looks infallible. Villa’s great run of form will come to an end. City are obviously dangerous but not quite the machine they’ve been in the past. Most teams in this league, bar one or two obvious exceptions, are capable of taking points off the top teams. In that classic football fan cope way, this is a scenario I’d gladly have taken back in August. It could have been better, but as we know it could easily be a lot worse.

It’s early December, 15 games gone, 23 to go. The majority of the season remains in front of us. We are top of the league. It’s a good place to be. Let’s keep it that way.

Right, I’ll leave it there this morning. We’ll have an Arsecast Extra for you later on, we’re recording around 10am. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server. The pod should be out around noon.

For now, have a good one.

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