Good morning.
It’s a brand new week, and quite possibly one of the most important weeks in the recent history of this football club. As expected, there was nothing other than a Man City win at Stamford Bridge. Fair play to anyone who sat down and endured that yesterday. I absolutely could not bring myself to experience something just so inevitable after what happened the previous day.
The gap is now just 6 points at the top, City have that game in hand, and so much now rests on Sunday’s trip to the Etihad. They can have a solid week of training, we have a Champions League quarter-final against Sporting Lisbon to deal with first. And yet however that might worry us as fans, the team cannot look at this as anything other than an opportunity.
We spent years in the European wilderness, from Champions League regulars (albeit regular departures at the Round of 16), to Europa League to nothing back to Europa League and then Champions League again. The best players and the best teams want to be involved at the business end of this competition, and we have a chance to make the semi-finals in consecutive years for the first time in Arsenal’s history. There will be more to say about that game later in the week, and on the one hand it might be viewed as an energy sapping trial ahead of ‘more important’ Premier League game, but it could turn out be the kind of confidence boost we need ahead of such a big game.
Certainly, that is how it needs to be framed internally. Externally, there’s nothing the players or the managers can do about how fans feel. Regardless of where you are on the scale of concern, from ‘not that worried’ to ‘oh shit we’ve blown it’, those feelings are informed fully by what we see on the pitch. Right now, since the Carabao Cup final, things have not been great, performances have been poor, and results not good enough.
One win in four games is cause for concern, particularly at this point of the season. It’s probably not helped by mischievous graphics doing the rounds on social media that make it look like we’ve barely won a game in April when in fact, if you go back to just last year, for example, and we enjoyed those two famous wins over Real Madrid in the very same month. We have enough to worry about without misinformation. It’s true our record in April has been sketchy, but let’s not allow understandable apprehension to override common sense.
Things can change quickly in football. It’s possible we could be sitting here a week from now feeling very, very differently. I know it’s not the same, but the gut-punch of that late Wolves equaliser away from home produced a similar kind of reaction to the Bournemouth defeat, and with a North London derby away, followed by tricky games against Chelsea and Brighton, I remember looking at the schedule and fearing more dropped points. And yet, three wins later the world felt a lot better.
I think we’re in that kind of territory again, but this time it’s amplified massively by the implications of Sunday’s game. For fans, the only thing that changes the mood is results. The manager and the players can find the right words in press conferences and pre-game interviews on the various broadcasters, but ultimately they have to do their talking on the pitch. If they do, the storm clouds part, the sun comes out, and we all feel much better about everything.
Obviously, for Mikel Arteta and for some of the players, media commitments are mandatory. You often hear people criticise things that are said as if they themselves have called a press conference in order to get on their soapboxes to pontificate, but they are obliged to do them, and obliged to answer questions put to them by the press. Some of those questions this week are going to be difficult, as they should be, but if at all possible I just want Arteta and whoever else to give the answers they’re supposed to give and nothing more.
I don’t want messaging about how fans need to bring their dinners – I understand that stuff and why it’s said, but I don’t think we need it. I don’t want to see training ground videos of the lads having a good time with silly songs or zany routines. I don’t want to see players up to some bullshit as they arrive at the stadium with some bullshit influencer. I want the club and those who are in charge of giving permission for that kind of nonsense to recognise now is not the time. Say no. It’s not that I think those things are a major issue, per se, or directly linked to how we perform, I just don’t want to see it.
There is a need to project an air of seriousness about what lies ahead in the next seven days. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the future of this project is in the balance right now. The result against Bournemouth, in my opinion, pushed us very strongly into now or never territory. I have some thoughts about how that might play out, but they can wait. I don’t think it’s useful for me to air them now, not least because – as I said above – we still have a huge opportunity ahead of us.
We can make the semi-finals of the Champions League. A win next Sunday would radically shift the odds of winning the Premier League after so long back in our favour. And that has to be how internally this week stacks up. It’s fine for us to feel crap about what happened on Saturday, and I think it’s perfectly normal to have concerns about our ability to get the results we all desperately want, but that’s our experience as fans.
The manager, the players, his coaching staff, they have to block all of that out. They need to remember how good they’ve been and how good they can be. We’ve talked so much about the team’s character, now is the time they absolutely need to show it, because for them, the reward is huge. While I have some questions about the quality in certain areas, I never doubt the effort or the desire of this group, and that can go a long, long way if you can lean into it properly.
There is the chance to make Arsenal history, to become a team that – if it wins the Premier League and/or the Champions League – will be remembered forever. For all the angst they have produced, games like Bournemouth or Wolves won’t matter if we lift the silverware. They’ll only be talked about as part of the lore, in much the same way as the poor results against Wimbledon and Derby enabled the unforgettable magic of Anfield ’89.
There’s a lot to play for. So let us worry, and just play. Be serious. Make it happen.
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Right, I’ll leave it there, but you can join myself and James an Arsecast Extra a bit later. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com. So fire away using 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 midday.
For now, have a good one.