No easy games? Surely this one would be for Arsenal. Never before in English football history had a team endured a worse league record after 15 matches than Wolves. In any of the professional divisions. Their haul of a meagre two points gave an outline of the grimness, although by no means all of the detail.
Before kick-off, the bookmakers had Wolves at 28-1 to win; it was 8-1 for the draw. And you just had to hand it to the club’s 3,000 travelling fans who took up their full ticket allocation. There were no trains back to Wolverhampton after the game, obviously. It was a weekend. Mission impossible? This felt like the definition of it.
Yet Wolves would scrap and they would confound. For the vast majority of the occasion, it came to feel as if we were watching the shock result of the season play out. Arsenal were horribly off their game. The Premier League leaders might have cited fatigue as an excuse. It was also possible to wonder whether complacency was at work.
Mikel Arteta’s team played their trump card on 70 minutes, from a corner, naturally. Little had done for them in open play. Bukayo Saka sent over the inswinger from the right and Sam Johnstone’s world fell in. The Wolves goalkeeper misread the flight and, scrambling back, he seemed to brush the ball against the far post. Whereupon it bounced back, hit him and went in.
