After prevailing in a gristly physical ballet with Chelsea, Arsenal’s season has now reached a point of pre-ignition
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amina mina. Waka, waka, hé-hé. By the end of this gruelling, bruising, deep tissue ache of a football match, it felt as though the opening 96 minutes had been staged simply as an extended tease for a startlingly carefree final 30 seconds.
Up to that point Arsenal and Chelsea had produced something that felt like the football equivalent of having your eyes descaled with a wire brush. This was a dense, gristly kind of physical ballet. Johan Cruyff once said that in football the clock is never your friend. It’s either moving too fast or too slowly. Here the clock didn’t really seem to move at all, or to be going backwards. The clock hated everyone.
And then suddenly, as it began to dawn that this really would actually end, it was school’s out for summer. It was the Gloucestershire cheese rolling championships. It was drunken farmers falling down a hill, as Arsenal broke, the pitch emptied, and Kai Havertz found himself all alone and through on goal.
