LONDON — Welcome to Arsenal’s cursed season. All sorts of reasons will be given for the 2-0 defeat to Newcastle likely to mean no trophy in March, a prime opportunity for Mikel Arteta to assert his status in English football that has eluded him.
This team, having just scored more than two expected goals on one of the Premier League’s in-form teams, lacks attacking mustard. They depend too much on Martin Odegaard in terms of creativity. They are dead ball plays or failures. Arteta has made this team too big, too clumsy and too conservative.
If any of those are the explanation you’re interested in, then the following really isn’t it. Listen to me, though. What if Arsenal is cursed? A particularly lavish bit of voodoo, the kind that many other teams would consider a dream season, but Arsenal: the year of Murphy’s Law all the same. There are other problems, solutions that could propel this team further up the table, but little to nothing, perhaps not even several hundred million in the transfer window, would have as profound a positive benefit as finding out what exactly is causing all this misfortune. Who found a monkey’s paw and asked for Arsenal to be contenders and not champions?
It’s the kind of season where your unstoppable set-piece machine can be as lethal as ever, creating multiple shots inside the six-yard box that somehow find their way over the bar when those angles seem to defy the physics. It’s the kind of season where you can miss a lot of opportunities and the guy you’ve had your eye on for years, seriously pondering whether he’ll be your next big No. 14, converts the best opportunity of all. It’s the kind of season where you can actually write to my editor, “If I start framing something around the cursed season, the ball bounces off Havertz’s appendage,” and the ball bounces off Havertz’s appendage.
Oh, and all that happens in one night.
None of this is to say that Arsenal were without flaws or to discount the excellence of match-winner Alexander Isak – whose two shots saw him steal the first and cheekily create the second, David Raya only getting in the way of Anthony Gordon – and Las qualities of Newcastle to exploit that. No team previously had the precision and pace in transition to undermine Arsenal’s policy of using Declan Rice as an attacking eight and defending four. Eddie Howe, advancing down the left through Lewis Hall and Gordon, found a way. They created two really good chances and took advantage of both.
Arsenal, meanwhile, finished this match with seven shots worth over 0.33 xG. They could have had even more if Newcastle’s 5-5-0 had not so emphatically stifled their cross threat in the closing stages. This match ended with 23 shots to seven, 3.12 xG to 1.22, 69% possession to 31%, 47 touches in the penalty area to 15. A team with those numbers does not usually lose 2-0. Perhaps a team that repeats this at St. James’ Park will make up this two-goal deficit. Maybe another Fulham, Everton, Brighton, Newcastle awaits them, take your pick.
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“If you look at what both teams produce and the dominance of the game, it is not a result that reflects the history of the game,” Arteta said. “The reality is that they were super efficient with the opportunities they had. We were not. At this level, in these scenarios, you need that to prevail and win games. It’s just halftime.” [in the tie]. “When I see the team play and how we deal with a lot of situations, playing against a very good team, I fully believe that we can go out and do it.”
It’s probably fair to say that Arsenal would have been better off tonight and would be better off in the second leg in February with at least one more incisive striker, an Isak-style talent who only needs one start. However, they were creating high-level opportunities for themselves in the living and dead game. Another night, Gabriel Martinelli drives the ball just inside the post. Havertz receives a deflected cross with his head instead of his arm. Any of the three or more times the ball bounced around the Newcastle area resulted in it landing on Arsenal’s right boot. Or the left.
This is just the story of the season. Serious injuries to Martin Odegaard and Bukayo Saka have been combined with the kind of team-directed damage that simply doesn’t affect a team winning league titles. This campaign started with jokes about Arteta hogging defences. The prolonged absences of Ben White, Takehiro Tomiyasu and Riccardo Calafiori (some more predictable than others) have meant throwing Myles Lewis-Skelly into the deep end, who continues to swim excellently against the tide of pressure thrown at him. Arsenal fans will not need to be reminded of the series of refereeing decisions that have left them outraged, marginal decisions that are within the letter of the law but have caused many to question the spirit in which they were refereed.
Odegaard tonight and for the last five months is Arsenal in microcosm. When it clicks – a delicate move around a lunging defender, a stretch of games in which no one seems capable of laying a glove on him – you convince yourself there’s talent here to win the biggest awards. But then there are injuries, illnesses, even the newborn. There is always something that gets in the way of the best.
There are ways Arsenal could have mitigated the misfortune that has befallen them. That extra elite striker that Arteta has wanted for some time has not been achieved. They tried other targets in the summer, could they have taken a big hit on Isak, he of the Thierry Henry-style celebrations, at a time when there is believed to be room for the PSR to add one more with big money? Even if it meant stalling future investments, this is a team that was ready to win now.
That explains why, despite all the bad news, they are still the best-placed team if the league leaders fall. They could still win at least one cup; that defense seems tailor-made for a deep run in the Champions League. This is not necessarily how the elite respond to bad times. Liverpool have shown this in the years in which they lost important figures like Virgil van Dijk. The loss of Rodri for an entire season could be more profound than a couple of months without Saka or Odegaard. It certainly seems that way when you watch Manchester City play.
Arteta would tell you exactly that. When asked by CBS Sports if this is an unlucky season, he was adamant. “Compared to last season, we are in the same position in the Premier League and we are out of the Carabao Cup. We are in a better position considering everything that happened. I really don’t want to take advantage [luck] like any excuse. The team still performs and competes with the best teams. We are one of the best teams right now. We produce much better things. There’s no time to talk about [luck]”.
Given that, the risk of relegation for Arsenal this season is nothing to fear. In the worst case, they would not win any trophies but would remain in the Champions League (Opta gives them a 98.75% chance of qualifying through the league). That won’t make it hurt any less. It seemed like it was going to be the year that a young, outstanding team would get the silverware. It could still be that way, but when every moment seems to be against you, could any player be blamed for concluding that it just isn’t happening this year? Fate has not been on Arsenal’s side.
