by The Premier League has always sold itself as a piece of cinema, a big-budget epic, an action franchise, a landscape of superheroes and super-soldiers. It makes a persuasive packaging, even if the reality is often more prosaic, dominated by remakes and familiar star turns, Pep Guardiola’s Mission Entirely Probable Volume 8.
It’s still shocking that 10 years have passed since the most powerful league in the world ran a three-way title race as close as the current season. But it looks like this one is really veering into really restrictive territory.
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So perhaps the extraordinary amount of excitement that Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City met at the top of the table, the hunger to see every blow in the story as a possible moment of resolution, the car in pursuit of the end, the decisive punch on the roof .
The last decider, Liverpool v City three weeks ago at Anfield, ended in an entertaining 1-1 draw that everyone seems to have already forgotten about. The latest title-buyer, Arsenal’s trip to the Etihad on Sunday evening, appears to have more in the way of a decider. At least this feels like a prequel, a bridging sequence, a final point resolution of the plot.
Not so much for City, who have taken the season before, who will feel they can get back into that position and feel good about it. But more so for Arsenal, who have no recent memory of winning things, who are under pressure to be the best team in the league so far in all the key numbers – goals, points, defense – and who may feel that this. It is an opportunity to be taken, that this is really their game.
The fixture list plays a role. Seven of City’s remaining 10 games look ceteris paribus, like the kind they usually walk through: West Ham, Wolves and Luton at home; Fulham, Nottingham Forest, Brighton and Crystal Palace away.
Arsenal have a slightly tougher rematch, with Manchester United away and a few more in danger in the north London derby. Logic and precedent suggest that someone will have to take points away from City to avoid the default champions making it four in a row. Arsenal themselves are the team best equipped to do that. Attraction would be fine. But there is a fair case that they must win on Sunday.
For this there would be additional interest in doing something new. Arsenal have a good away record. What they lack is a winning “statement”. Newcastle’s last major Premier League away win was in May. The best results from this season were the win in Seville and the final against Anfield.
It’s a shortcoming that Arteta will be keen to address, especially when it comes to his own terrible record at his old workplace. Five trips to the Etihad as Arsenal manager produced five wins (scores: 3-0, 1-0, 5-0, 1-0 and 4-1). No member of the current squad scored a goal for Arsenal at the Etihad, the last of which was Rob Holding’s 86th-minute consolation in a game that effectively ended his time at the club. This would be an ideal moment to overthrow the dominant paradigm.
How, though? The intensity of the method is the main ingredient rather than some wrong tactical change. Arsenal are unlikely to be spring surprises. The game will be Arsenal on their best days, but more than that, and the conviction that the strongest parts of this team, the patterns that always put their best players in the best attacking positions, the movement and push in and out of possession, will. in the end tell. This was crucial to Arsenal’s victory at the Emirates over City in October, a day when they took all the air out of the game and found a break in the seam late on.
The approach will be to do more of this as the season winds down. When Arteta talked about the need for champion players to continue producing the same high-intensity game every three days even when their tendons are twisting he was thinking of periods like this.
Internationals aside, Arsenal have not played a game for 17 days. This is the second period of rest for these players since Christmas. They are a younger team than City, with three key players essentially under the age of 28, with William Saliba, Ben White, Gabriel, Bukayo Saka, Martin Ødegaard, Gabriel Martinelli, Kai Havertz and Declan Rice all 26 and under at Arsenal. This group will not have a better chance to apply their own super strengths.
There are other details. Erling Haaland is a significant presence for both teams. It has been suggested in recent weeks that it is essential to end the City’s lead in order to contain this iteration. Very good one-on-one defenders managed to restrict Haaland’s movements in the spaces where he scored a goal, and in the process effectively took one City player off the field, given the limited range of his game.
Haaland has been unremarkable by his standards, with a goal in three of his 10 Premier League games. And despite the sheer number of mind-boggling he also has things to do. Haaland’s iconography is big goals at big times. It wasn’t quite like that. Last season he did not score a decisive goal against a major opponent during the season. He has one goal in open play in the first half of a league game since October 21.
The noise around five goals at Luton, a solitary bully, the hammer of wishes and so on, is absurd given what the 22-year-old has done in a treble-winning season. Games are tougher but tougher. Everyone has less individual influence. But this was the ideal moment to reiterate its value; or alternatively for Arsenal to sustain that run.
Otherwise Martinelli feels like a mainstay on Sunday, fitness permitting. This is an attacking player whose impact goes beyond basic numbers. Martinelli’s ability to run with the ball at an alarming pace, to skate on that left side as a super-defensive, forward-guard, always ready for the quick switch, gives Arsenal a sense of threat in every other part of the pitch.
Still, however, decision makers are rarely their own decision makers; with eight games to go until the final Super Sunday. But this feels like a moment for the season to enter its final act; and perhaps a more important moment for Arsenal as they struggle to establish their own main character energy.
