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It was probably Arsenal’s best performance in two months, but that will be scant consolation. Manchester City’s win on Sunday leaves Pep Guardiola’s side in control of the title race; they will go top of the Premier League on goal difference if they beat Burnley at Turf Moor on Wednesday. Both sides will then have five games to play.
Sunday’s game was decided by desperately fine margins. What prevented Eberechi Eze’s whipped shot from just outside the box going in? An inch? Half of one? Gabriel also struck the woodwork, while Kai Havertz headed a great chance a fraction over the crossbar in injury time. It was a defeat that has handed City the advantage in the title race, but it could very easily have been a battling draw to preserve Arsenal’s lead and, perhaps more importantly, restore morale.
But then City also hit the woodwork and had 15 chances to Arsenal’s nine; while Arsenal’s goal was as freakish as they come. Bemoaning fortune makes no sense on either side.
Nobody should think the race is over. While there has been a clear sense of City shifting up a gear since the League Cup final, they are not the remorseless force of old. After the Burnley game, they face Everton away, Brentford at home, Bournemouth away and Aston Villa at home, as well as a home game against Crystal Palace that is yet to be scheduled. This is a side that last month drew against Nottingham Forest and West Ham and were well-beaten by Real Madrid. There is no reason to assume they will win six out of six.
Arsenal have Newcastle and Fulham at home, West Ham away, Burnley at home and Crystal Palace away. It’s entirely plausible they could win all of those. And they will have the benefit of having Gabriel available after he escaped a red card for flicking his head into the face of Erling Haaland, a decision that was very difficult to understand. Haaland, effectively, paid the price for standing looking at him with an air of magnificent bemusement; a different player would have collapsed and then it’s hard to see how Gabriel could have avoided dismissal. (It’s a side issue, but this is why players dive and feign injury; the flick of the head was clear but Gabriel got away with it because of Haaland’s refusal to react, something that disadvantaged City in the short term of the game but also in the sense that the defender will not now serve a three-match ban.) Equally, if Rodri’s groin injury is serious, City may be missing him for some or all of what remains of the season.
But to say there is no need for despondency at Arsenal is perhaps to miss the point. They have become despondent. They have begun to doubt themselves. They didn’t play badly on Sunday. There was no sense of them bottling the game. There was a bizarre error early on as David Raya was almost caught in possession by Haaland but that aside there was no obvious sign of anxiety or nerves, which have stifled them in recent weeks. They played just as you’d expect an away side at City to play.
The problem is that having won only one of their previous five games (admittedly only one of them in the league), this had become a match in which Arsenal couldn’t afford any slip-ups. The psychological momentum is now with City. And this was a game that highlighted one other clear problem: their lack of an elite centre-forward. Viktor Gyökeres does not hold the ball up well and, for all the goals he scored in the Championship for Coventry and in the Portuguese League for Sporting, is not an ultra-sharp goalscorer. At least one high-level Premier League club looked at him at Sporting and concluded he is not quite good enough at getting shots away in tight spaces.
Havertz probably played that hold-up role better on Sunday than Gyökeres could have, but he is not a striker. All players miss chances, but how often would Haaland have missed that late header? Or, more pertinently, how often would peak Alexander Isak have done so? How different the season might have looked had Arsenal gone big early in the summer for the Sweden international rather than signing Gyökeres and Noni Madueke.
But that is something to try to put right in the summer. What matters from Mikel Arteta and Arsenal’s point of view is to pick themselves up, put the gloom of the past month behind them and win their five remaining league games to at least put pressure on City. Their chance of the league title has not entirely gone, and they have a Champions League semi-final to play. Re-establishing momentum when it has been lost is extremely difficult, but there have been plenty of twists in this title race already. Why should there not be one more?
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