VAR offers up Arsenal’s title-deciding moment for digital mess generation | Barney Ronay

Chris Kavanagh examines footage of the wrestling before Callum Wilson found the net. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Getty Images

And everyone, everywhere, gets to appreciate the astonishing dramatic irony of Arsenal, kings of the set-piece wrestle, being saved by the notion that, in fact, that kind of behaviour really isn’t the done thing.

Was it the right decision? Callum Wilson had put the ball in the net after a multi-player bundle. The issue was the trailing arm of Pablo, which extended across David Raya’s throat and clavicle area as he reached to punch the ball.

Your view of whether this was a foul or legitimate contact will depend, beyond club colours, on whether words such as “soft” are part of the lexicon (strictly, they’re not). But it was on balance a foul, even if that balance is 55-45. To be fair to a referee doing a ridiculously high pressure job on some very fine details, Kavanagh-England got it right, earned their moment of flourish at the death.

Was it an obvious error, though? Did it actually meet the threshold for referral? These are huge and, indeed, hugely tedious questions that thankfully don’t have to be answered now. The bigger question is: should it have even come to this for Mikel Arteta, who strayed very close here not just to two dropped points but what might otherwise have been a day of deeply bruising tactical overthink?

The game had been 0-0 until the 83rd minute, when Leandro Trossard scored Arsenal’s goal. At which point Arteta celebrated by doing something close to a mid-air splits, head thrown back, hitch-kicking his way down the touchline. Understandably so, as Arteta had in some ways done this to himself.

Stratford had been a chilly, grey early summer place at kick‑off. The West Ham managerial rectangle is vast, taking in the ghost of the running track, and Arteta was out right by the touchline from the start, in tight grey trousers and slinky black quarter-zip, a tiny figure alone in all that vast space, like a Lego man on the moon.

And for a while Arsenal had this game by the throat. They had eight shots in the opening 20 minutes. At which point an injury to Ben White’s knee led to a strange rejig, with Declan Rice moving to right-back, Myles Lewis‑Skelly staying in midfield.

This was a mistake from Arteta. West Ham found themselves suddenly in the game, touching the ball, feeling better, the crowd roused. It is always very hard to reset and regas at times such as this, like trying to put the bubbles back in your bottle of water.

At half-time Arteta did the right thing, fixing the error, bringing on Cristhian Mosquera and shifting Rice into the middle again. And it felt fitting, in the end, that Rice should play the pass that led to Martin Ødegaard’s little jink and pass for the goal. Rice deserved it. He kept going, played three positions, was booed all afternoon, must have felt all the talk of big players and stepping up at his back. Well, he did here.

And in the end victory was probably deserved, whatever your verdict on the VAR. Arsenal have stopped conceding goals since the loss at Manchester City. Rice was right about that too. It is now so close they can taste it. All that seems certain: there will be more pain yet to come.