Football Daily | Arsenal emerge after being fed feet-first through the emotional wood-chipper

UNDER THE GUNNERS

Well, that escalated slowly. While Arsenal left it late to score their winner against West Ham on Sunday, they got the job done and now find themselves a couple of straightforward wins against the second worst team in the league and Crystal Palace Under-9s from the Premier League title that has eluded them for 22 years. Except this Arsenal team doesn’t really do “straightforward”, as they showed when letting West Ham nab an added-time equaliser, only for it to be snatched away following an intervention from the curtain-twitching buzzkills in their Stockley Park joy-vacuum. If Football Daily was an Arsenal fan, our soul would almost certainly have left our body as we watched Chris Kavanagh repeatedly rock-and-roll the footage on his touchline monitor, trying to pick through the weeds of the 1,057 different fouls being committed simultaneously by players from both teams. Eventually, he arrived at what (everyone except Peter Schmeichel and a few Pearly Kings agreed) was probably the correct decision.

“Probably today I have realised how difficult and how big is the referee’s job,” parped Mikel Arteta, who would almost certainly have been whistling a completely different tune if it was his team who had a goal chalked off in identical circumstances. “Because you’re talking about a moment that can decide the history, the course, of two massive clubs that are fighting with their lives to achieve their objectives.” While Arsenal inched another three points nearer the Premier League utopia that is Dreamland, their endless capacity to feed their fans feet-first through the emotional wood-chipper means there could yet be an unlikely twist in this tale despite the apparent simplicity of their two remaining assignments. All sorts of people don’t like watching Arsenal play football for a variety of reasons, but the sheer intensity of the torment they are forced to endure on a match-by-match basis must have a sizeable proportion of the team’s own fans questioning their life choices. “The only thing that matters is now and the present and making it happen on the day,” trilled Arteta. “Today we’ve done it. There are two more to go. The only focus is Burnley.”

For Manchester City, the only focus is on Wednesday night’s match against a Crystal Palace side that will almost certainly bear little or no resemblance to the pale facsimile of itself that will line up against Arsenal three days before the club’s Tin Pot final against Rayo Vallecano in Leipzig later this month. Anything less than an emphatic victory against Oliver Glasner’s side will almost certainly end City’s already slim hopes of silencing the Emirates confetti cannons and with potentially difficult games to come against Bigger Cup qualification hopefuls Bournemouth and Aston Villa, even that might not be enough. “I’m not responsible for Arsenal and I’m not responsible for Manchester City,” honked Glasner last week. “I’m responsible for Crystal Palace and I get paid for doing the best things for Crystal Palace.” Entirely responsible for Manchester City and with a minor influence on the general Arsenal mood, for now the ball is back in Pep Guardiola’s court.