Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!
Top of the league, Wembley trip booked, sweeping through Europe, and blessed with a cushty FA Cup draw – it’s fair to say the Arsenal garden is in full, radiant bloom. At least, it was until they travelled to a wet and windy Molineux to play a match the Premier League surreptitiously slipped into the schedule like a worm tablet hidden in a dog’s dinner. In Wolves, Mikel Arteta’s side were facing a team who are not only the worst in the top flight by some distance, but one who have only recently begun battling to avoid going down as the most awful of all time. Having taken a two-goal lead, the only logical question centred around how many more Arsenal would spank past their hapless hosts. Instead, logic gave way to the objective hilarity of a collective on and off-field meltdown as the Gunners managed to turn what should have been a stroll into an inexplicable 2-2 draw.
No stranger to defending the indefensible, even their head coach was unable to come up with any excuses for his side’s quite extraordinary capitulation to the Premier League’s bottom-dwellers. “I think any question, any criticism, any opinion, you have to take on the chin today,” said Mikel Arteta on the back of a draw it would be fair to say even the most measured and well-adjusted Arsenal fans everywhere are viewing as two points dropped rather than a precious one gained. “That’s it. Any bullet, take it because we didn’t perform at the level that is required. So anything that anybody says can be right, because we didn’t do what we had to do.”
