Arsenal may have cracked the code
Title credentials will be revealed in today’s toughest test
They say that if you are going to eventually beat your perennial conquerors, you have to first become them. By osmosis you learn to emulate them, turning every defeat into a lesson by which you inch your way ever closer to their standard.
It is a process that requires plenty of pain along the way. When Arsenal fetched up at the Etihad Stadium almost 11 months ago they were five points ahead of their hosts at the top of the table; they were serious contenders for the title. By full-time they were stripped bare of any such aspirations. The champions handed them another lesson; Manchester City slapped down the pretenders with a devastating demonstration of their authority; Mikel Arteta and his squad returned to London smarting from a severe punishment for their temerity. Everyone knew the race was over; City duly cruised to their fifth title under Pep Guardiola in six seasons.
And now the pretenders return today to the site of that 4-1 crucifixion last April. This time they lead the table on mere goal difference to Liverpool in second, and City a point behind in third. This time they are a discernibly harder, more experienced outfit. They are scoring goals for fun but at the other end they have become a much tougher nut to crack. That high-functioning balance between steel and style is looking more and more like the requisite formula for this marathon of endurance and class that English football’s greatest prize has always demanded.
Arteta is looking increasingly like a manager who has cracked the code. He has built a squad with the blend of ingredients and range of qualities that makes them much more likely to go the distance this season. Declan Rice has been a transformational signing in this construction project. Rice is factory-made for this, the Grand National among soccer’s elite domestic championships. Physically and mentally he is a thoroughbred warhorse who also happens to have more than enough ability with the ball at this feet too.
The Arsenal squad that was already in situ last summer when he arrived from West Ham has visibly grown in his company — and it was bound to mature and develop anyway from last season’s trial run at the title.
But once again they will face the most formidable test of their renewed credentials this afternoon. Manchester City are a team of scalpels. Guardiola has trademarked the game of football as a form of life-ending surgery in which the patient arrives hale and hearty only to leave as a cadaver 90 minutes later, having been dissected to death by the blades on the boots of his elite operators.
All of this technical mastery that he deploys should not obscure the manager’s primal lust for victories. He appears to be impossible to satiate. Guardiola the purist is also Guardiola the junkie, the addict, the maniacal craver of win after win
after win. He has implanted that voracious desire in every team he has ever managed; it is the hungry heart that beats away beneath the sophistication of his engineering and the aesthetics of his designs. All of that beauty is ultimately in the service of omni-dominance.
At his press conference on Friday he once again made no effort to disguise how bored he has apparently become with this numbing ritual, the exact same kind of staged setpiece between manager and media that Jürgen Klopp cited as one of the reasons why he will walk away from it all at the end of the season.
Whatever was on Guardiola’s mind regarding today’s confrontation, the Spaniard was keeping it under lock and key. The only glimpse behind the facade was a suggestion of worry about the hiatus to their momentum brought on by the international window. City have gone 15 days without a game. And even then he conveyed his concern more by gesture than words, if indeed he was concerned at all.
“We played really good the last month,” he replied to a question on the subject, “but the international break, always the first game after the international break, it ...” he turns up his palms and shrugs his shoulders as if to say that anything can happen, you just don’t know.
Arteta at his presser was also invited to discuss the same issue. Arsenal had enjoyed eight wins in a row before the squad broke up in the middle of March. “Well, you cannot do it,” he said when asked about re-discovering that momentum, “that moment is gone. They had to go to [their] international teams, we have maximised as much as we possibly could the time we had here with [our remaining] players and now everybody is back and looking forward to it.”
Liverpool will feature in today’s curtain-raiser to the main event, against Brighton at Anfield. His squad was facing into a “super-intense schedule”, said Klopp, “but it’s not interrupted any more by any kind of international duties so that means everybody can focus on club football and it’s exactly what we will do.”
So, the decks are cleared for the big charge down the home straight. March is turning to April and the three horses are spread neck and neck across the head of the field. It was put to Klopp on Friday that one, and maybe both, of his rivals will drop points today. Naturally, he batted that one back: Liverpool would be concentrating on Brighton only. “[It] has nothing to do with the other game, obviously.”
Equally obviously, it has everything to do with the other game. His wish list will be three points in the bag at Anfield and then straight to the flat-screen TVs to see if City and Arsenal can cannibalise each other with a share of the spoils. Every point dropped by one’s opponents will be a precious marginal gain in this agonising battle of marginal gains.
Including today’s fixtures, the trio each have 10 games left in the league. “These are all finals for us,” declared Klopp, straightforwardly. “It is like that. So it [doesn’t] mean you cannot lose one or whatever, it just means it is a final, each of these games.” Whatever happened in the previous 28 games is “not important anymore. We are where we are and these are the last 10 games. It’s too early to see the finishing line but at least it’s 28 games further than the beginning of the season ... We have to play actually our best football [now] and get results. That’s how it is if you want to win the Premier League.”
The moment of truth is fast materialising in front of all of their eyes. For Arteta and his band of searchers, it will loom large this afternoon. Arsenal have given every appearance this season that they have learned the hard lessons well. They have closed the gap to the champions. Three and a half months after their 4-1 meltdown, Arsenal clung onto City in the Community Shield on August 6; they forced a late, late equaliser and won it on penalties. On October 8 at the Emirates they beat City 1-0 and, after a wobble in December, began firing on all cylinders in the new year.
The champions, said Arteta on Friday, have made the league better, the game better and Arsenal better. “They have raised the bar.” But, they are returning to the Etihad better prepared for the battle. Does it feel different this season, he was asked, to last season? “Yeah, it is different,” he replied, not with any defiance, just as if it were a matter of fact.
Just how much better they are, and how different it is, will be revealed in these most testing of laboratory conditions today.
The range of qualities that makes them more likely to go the distance