Arsenal And The Angels Gabriel
A heartfelt thank you, a brave-hearted rant and a heart-warming match report.
This week’s AW is in three parts. Feel free to read them in which ever order you want (best from start to finish I’d say).
Part 1 - A Heartfelt Thank You
I want to start this week’s AW by thanking you, dear reader. I’m guessing you read Arsenal Wonderland on a weekly basis because you love football, you love Arsenal, and (I hope) your partial to my peculiar offbeat perspective.
Most of the football content I engage with - mainly podcasts - are not at all similar to the content I produce. I regularly listen to Arseblog with Andrew and James and their warmly clever, friendly and soothing analysis. If there ever was a podcast that felt like perching on a bar stool at your local, Arseblog is it. They ought to use the theme-tune to Cheers.
But I can’t create Arseblog-style content. Or Arsenalvision. I can’t replicate Elliot’s feverish 100-mile-an-hour enthusiasm or Clive’s calm-daddy-objective-yet-subjective vibe (delivered in his wonderful dulcet tones). And I definitely can’t produce anything like the ardent Arsenal dialogue-along with a thousand live-chatters that Soph and Super Kev manage to perform on the Highbury Squad on a weekly basis. All great stuff.
My favourite analyst currently is Adrian Clarke, the ex-player, writer and presenter on Arsenal.com. His acute understanding of the game is fascinating. And his smart breakdown of matches always reveals new angles I hadn’t seen. I’d love to have that level of insider knowledge and clarity of vision. But instead, I’m basically a fan with a keyboard, a dog and a writerly bent.
If you listen to Arseblog, Arsenalvision, Highbury Squad or Adrian Clarke you get beautifully packaged and delivered content with the added bonus of having smart soundbites to share in the bar - “you realise it was Zinchenko’s verticality through the lines from the double pivot with Rice that spliced their midfield diamond and bypassed the low block”- you’ll be bought drinks when you offer such pearls of expert analysis. There’s no drinks coming your way after reading one of my articles - “That win reminded me of Henry Grantland Rice, the complexity of Zhejiang cuisine and the fact that hyperreality is no substitute for the deeply sensuous and miraculous actual life we share between ourselves!” - time to lay off the booze dude?
As regular readers will know, tactical breakdowns aren’t really my thing. I’m more likely to offer images of Lascaux Cave paintings than a series of screen grabs to illustrate moments from the game. Maybe I should dine from the statistical smorgasbord a little more, although and (in football vernacular) to be fair, I can’t help but point out that those tactical and statistical blow-by-blow analyses are also just another way of processing the emotional experience of fandom, but they’re dressed up in a white coat. In fact, most football content seems to be a disguised coping mechanism for coming to terms with powerlessness, uncertainty, guessing, hoping, surmising and peering into the darkness beyond the firelight that is, as we know, fandom.
I suppose in some ways Arsenal Wonderland is partially my attempt to expand the perspective of football writing from a narrow on-field focus to a broader beyond-the-pitch focus, and to embed the sport we love in the lives we lead instead of treating it like a detached, disconnected and separate entity orbiting society. After all, football is an emergent phenomena that grows out of our societies and a reflection of our current historical period just as much as anything else.
Well, thankfully there’s plenty of room for all these different approaches. I say let’s have as much variety as we can muster. The more multifarious the world the better and Arsenal Wonderland is just another attempt at an elegant record of what experiencing football as a fan and a human being is like. And you, dear reader, seem to appreciate this ornate reflection of life and football enough to come back week after week to wade through my offerings.
I honestly hope you’re enjoying these snow-word-globes. And I truly appreciate you taking the time to read them. So thank you.
Part 2 - A Brave-Hearted Rant
One of the unique aspects of Arsenal Wonderland is the allegorical nature of some of my musings. Although I’m ostensibly writing about football, I’m also sometimes conjuring up a (thinly veiled) symbolic narrative about the state of our world. So, it’s difficult to write about the match between Arsenal and Manchester City without being cognizant of the way football clubs operate these days and the fact that off-pitch economic and social realities are the true determining factor of a club’s on-pitch success.
Coming up against the Light Blue Juggernaut is more than coming up against a well-drilled team full of the creme-de-la-creme elite players with one of the worlds most intense football thinker-tinkerer managers. Playing Man City means coming face to face with the reality of inequality. Economic disparity in football means a tiny number of clubs around the world enjoy massive advantages over the vast majority of other clubs. And that tiny number of clubs even have their own micro-hierarchy way up there at the summit of power in football.
And I’m not even being partisan here. I understand that Arsenal is amongst that tiny number and as such wields extraordinary financial power compared to 99% of the rest of the world’s clubs. We’re backed by a Billionaire willing to spend more on a midfielder than the GDP of the Pacific nation Nauru. When a single football club has the capacity to spend more on a player than the total economic output of a small country it's worth raising an eyebrow.
Of course the usual retort is to pop on a white coat and pompously point out the brutal reality of market economics. To reel off phrases like internal and external revenue streams, amortisation of asset values, debt versus owner funding and so on. These are arguments that appeal to a kind of realpolitik which essentially demands acceptance that it’s just the way things are. And more often than not people will argue that expecting anything else is just naive in today’s economic reality (which is ironic to say the least because economics itself is the most fanciful of all subjects. Talk about white coat envy. Economics is the perfect example of a discipline built on the flimsiest of foundations masquerading as a quantifiable science. Economics is far closer to philosophy than it is to physics. Naivety? Yeah, ok dude, whatever).
So, here’s the thing. Football is a competitive sport. But right now, where does the majority of the competition actually happen, on or off the pitch? What’s more likely to contribute to success, the people in the changing room or the people in the boardroom? What we surely want as fans is an even playing field where competing teams are able to win trophies through dedication, smart coaching, clever management and interesting tactical innovation. What we want is a democratised opportunity spectrum where clubs compete with each other according to the rules of the game, instead of according to the bank-balance of their backers. In today’s “realpolitik” the primary hope isn’t more equity across Planet Football but for one’s own team to win the Owner Jackpot and thus be able to afford to seriously compete for trophies. Do we really want a kind of Footballing Feudalism where the whims of the super rich determine the outcomes for everyone else? Being that football is a reflection of how the rest of society operates I’m increasingly depressed by this insane and thoughtless approach.
Huge wealth disparity isn’t improving football or the world in which football is embedded. On the contrary, it’s making the whole edifice incredibly unstable and dangerous. Football fans were rightly incredibly agitated a few years back when the Super-League was mooted because the idea essentially killed off competition, rewarded the super rich and further disintegrated and distanced communities from the clubs at their heart. The unfortunate truth is that this is happening slowly but surely anyway.
Part 3 - A Heart-Warming Match Review
OK, let’s now put all that to one side (sorry, probably should have started with this section) and make an attempt to produce some proper football content…
…But you know what, sometimes it’s the wait that counts. Not the actual moment you’ve been waiting for but the wait itself. It’s like drawing the string back on a bow, slowly, slowly, increasing the tension, pulling those microscopic extra nanometers, waiting those few nanoseconds more until the string is as taut as it will ever be, and then all of a sudden, the release. The flight of the arrow owes everything to the preceding moments, to the string, to the draw. Without the time leading up to the release, the arrow is nothing.
Sometimes in life it’s the moments we wish away that really hold power. We wish them away because we’re so fixated on the now and the future and our desires. But sometimes it’s the past that contains the magic. And we never seem to fully comprehend that all moments are mutually dependent and equally beautiful.
Those long 8 years since we last beat Manchester City in the league revealed themselves to be wonderful because finally we beat them. Every one of those years had increased the tension until Martinelli’s pinged shot angled off Ake’s face and the arrow of joy finally took flight as all those slow years revealed how essential they were as everything pinged into the Now.
Strange how subjective time can be. Only clocks tick with regularity. The time we feel, true non-mechanical human time, is elastic. There were million’s of years crammed into this match. In the final four minutes entire species evolved and went extinct, their fossils dug up and exhibited in crumbling museums before that whistle finally blew for full time.
It was edgy. Uncomfortable. Like an aged couple Mikel and Pep have to work hard to surprise each other. This was a match of finishing each other’s sentences, barely smiling at each others familiar quips. A stubborn cagey opening with neither wanting to give an inch, where Arsenal seemed at first more rheumatic, more reluctant. And even the sky was expecting a City win, sporting its unseasonal powder blue.
And like an old couple the crazy days of reckless abandon were behind them. Arsenal approached the match with a considered, intense and calm manner. The Emirates may have wanted to recreate the blistering manic pace of last season but Arteta and the team were out to win this game at the expense of everything else, including histrionics. And it worked. It was mostly dreary and laborious but that didn’t matter because these particular 3 point were priceless. These 3 points were more precious than any other 3 points we’ve taken for a very long time. These 3 points were a coming of age.
Arsenal knew from the beginning what they were doing and they performed their tasks impeccably. Except, of course, the ref. Kovačić should have been sent off after 2 obvious yellow card tackles. But in a perverse way I’m glad he stayed on. Had Kovačić been sent off the Zombie Narrative would have been that Man City were weakened. But Micheal Oliver’s failure to perform his duty meant that Zombie Narrative was put to sleep before it even awoke. In desperation Pep and his wordsmiths already began talking of a “deflected goal” as soon as the microphones were turned on. Fair enough. You’ve gotta pull at those straws sometimes I guess.
Saliba was imperious. Gabriel commanding. Between them they took a wild Tasmanian Devil of a striker and domesticated him in the space of a game. Erling Haaland came onto the pitch snarling and bloodthirsty and left house-trained and ready for walkies. And as Harland was being contained we released our own footballing demon. The single-minded predator with winged feet, Gabriel Martinelli, the trickster and troublemaker embroiling himself in mischief and mystery as he flys up and down the wing. Martinelli played like a mature Arsenal’s embodied youthful memories. Remember how we used to be? Ah yes, remember our younger days.
Everyone to a man was worth their place in the team, even Raya, who struggled but persevered with the instruction. But the Four substitutes were poetry in motion. Four players that wrote a haiku for the goal. Party, Tomi, Kai and Gabby. Partey’s vision saw the space, Tomi ran to fill the space, Kai’s calm coolness caressed the space and Martinelli’s shot owned the space. Has there even been a better four substitution combination in such a vital match? It reminded me of when Henry returned to Arsenal and scored the winner against Leeds from the bench. The high relief combined with fairytale disbelief. Oh man. Sometimes being a fan is such bliss. Sunday’s match was one of those times. Long may it continue!
So there you go fellow Gooners. A long and intense article full of life and love and dreams just for you. I hope my somewhat off-pitch focus didn’t have you reaching for the yellow card, but sometimes you’ve got to appeal to the inner ref in all of us! Thanks again for reading and have yourself a wonderful week.
Love this! Especially the characterisation of Gabi as our very own Mercury. Brilliant!