OK, so it was all building to this, then. The slow‑burn plotlines. The room‑temperature action sequences. The winter afternoons on the sofa watching men wrestle unhappily, staring out of the window as the frigid wind tousles the clouds, wondering about the death of all things, and also why referees not only have to speak now but speak in the same awkward Yorkshire bingo‑caller voice.
All of this. It’s all actually fine. Because it turns out this was just delayed resolution, cinematic build, the sporting equivalent of a really long closeup of a man in a wide-brimmed Mexican hat narrowing his eyes and chewing a cigar. And now we get the payoff. The Etihad on Sunday afternoon. The clink of spurs. The tick of the clocktower. Townsfolk huddled at the saloon-bar shutters. Get ready for an old-school shootout.
So maybe this is how it’s going to go down. Manchester City as the avengers, in pursuit of an Arsenal team they have tracked across the plains from October to April. And a game that is as close as we’ve had in some time to a late-season title decider.
There is perhaps a hint of desperation in placing so much store in this single act. Even after Sunday the top two have a combined 13 league games left to play. Given the nature of the story to date, which seems to have been scripted by a particularly gloomy and unforgiving Samuel Beckett, there is a fair chance that instead of sweetness, flow and resolution, we may still end up with two hours of corners, existential dread and arguments about video assistant referees.
But there is a fascinating keynote to the surrounding noise. The Premier League has been functional this season. The top teams have been stodgy or transitional. The dramatic void has been filled instead by a very stark managerial psychodrama. At a time when football has never been so mechanised and data heavy, the race to accrue slightly more points and goals over 38 games has been cast as a test of purely human qualities, such as courage, bottle, balls, spleen.
In an unusual way, too. We’ve had chokes before. When Kevin Keegan dished up his moment of founding Premier League title theatre – loving it, not saying things like that about a man like Stuart Pearce – his key flaw was too much emotion, too much freedom. With Arsenal and Mikel Arteta the nature of the alleged potential choke (also known as: coming first or second in the world’s toughest league) is the opposite; an absence of feeling, too much rigidity.
People seem to want this. There is a tangible desire out there to see the title denouement as a public rejection of Dalek-ball, set pieces, the mechanised loom, chatbots, the coming singularity under our new AI overlords. Basically everyone wants to see Arteta’s circuit boards burst into flames, his robot eyes winking out, the advanced human replicant whose only flaw is he doesn’t know you shouldn’t bite the head off an owl in front of a Blade Runner.
In an odd twist, this has involved the elevation of City to the status of people’s champions and the recasting of Pep Guardiola, high priest of possession ball, as the lone torchbearer of self-expression and the rehumanising of sport. Robots against slightly-less-like-robots. It works, kind of.
Either way, that dualism is fixed now. Guardiola has leant into his new status as feelings guy, the anti-android. Earlier this week, Noel Gallagher was on national radio saying: “Yeah, Pep texted me after the Chelsea game, and he’s proper fired up,” and this all fits. Was Arteta emailing Damon Albarn after Bournemouth, or going out for coffee with the drummer from Shed Seven? No. He was unscrewing his robot Lego-head and greasing his diodes. He was scrolling TikTok videos in a vain attempt to understand human emotion.
This seems to fit some wider anxiety. No doubt there is a really annoying middle-aged column to be written describing Arsenal as the embodiment of gen Z-ball, a team defined by anxiety, trigger warnings, food allergies, basically playing football in sensory ear defenders. When Putin’s tanks roll westward, where will Arsenal be? Eating vegan feta cheese. Dancing to techno with Zack Polanski. Or perhaps not. Is this actually what’s happening? Sport loves to spin these broadbrush stories. But this one is above all massively unfair on Arteta, who is not in fact a fraud or a coward or an emissary of Skynet, whether he wins the league or not.
It is worth being clear on this. By any standard Arteta has done a sensational job in his first head-coach role. The team and the playing culture have been transformed. This is a good project. Before the splurge last summer, Arsenal had the fourth-highest net spend over five seasons. Sunday’s opponents still have a far higher wage bill. Right now Arteta is competing against the champion team of the age and also its greatest manager, who also happens to be his own coaching mentor. And, as ever, this is a Pep story. What Arteta’s Arsenal are really telling us is just how good Guardiola is at this, and how deeply he still defines the way the game is played.
Both managers have a desire for control. But Guardiola also designed the system, has been pushing it out for 30 years. He understands better than anyone that he also has to challenge it. If City have more invention in their team this is not because of romanticism, bravery, or pluck. It’s a hard tactical choice, one Guardiola has been willing to swallow as an act of compromise with his first instinct.
Guardiola knows he has to make himself uncomfortable, to create tension with his system to reach the heights of his best teams. It is no coincidence that Rayan Cherki, ball-juggling, bottle-tossing, performatively expressing himself, feels like a defining image of the run-in. This is not because Pep likes cigars and hangs out with old rock stars. It is because he has learned that he needs to recruit players with attributes that alarm him.
He knows from endless elite experience that it’s not just harder to win in April, but that being free enough to make the difference in those games is an act of extreme technical skill. Most title wins are littered with tales of bad days at the office rescued by the in-house A-lister. All teams tense up in the run-in. With this in mind, Arsenal made a tactical mistake in their recruitment last summer, broadening the squad when they might have been better served adding higher peaks.
The point here is that almost everything in elite sport comes back to talent and choices. A group of players doesn’t become braver or more noble because they have a functioning centre-forward and a better balance of creative talent. They’re just better coached, more expertly run. City’s looseness, their greater April creativity, is a function of Guardiola being not just the greatest coach, but the greatest exponent of his own way of playing.
This is helped also by the fact he has a perfectly grooved system with bottomless resources: how much easier to settle high-value recruits, how much simpler to tell your players to go out and express themselves. The harder I massively control every element and bend the entire structure of English football to my vision, the more relaxed and flexible I seem to be.
Arteta knows this too, of course, knows his team can become overmannered under pressure, knows it needs to find a way to play with freedom at this stage. Even the awkwardness of Arsenal’s staging around the games, the embarrassing LinkedIn uncle stuff, seems to reflect that missing element, as though this is Arteta trying to force-feed the idea of freedom, looseness and feeling good into a team that, while supremely organised, just isn’t at that creative level yet. Get on the fun bus. Be who we are. The tifo before the Sporting game with its weirdly intense, outsized, disembodied Leandro Trossard head in “binoculars” pose, looming like the eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, which also happens to be a terrifying portent of imminent doom and collapse.
With this in mind, the starkness of Sunday’s task may have its own benefits. The job is simple: avoid defeat. Arsenal have, until the past five games, been very good at this. No goals conceded across 180 minutes of a Champions League quarter-final is a major act of collective defending. Even, whisper it, character.
The attack may have congealed but again this is cause and effect rather than a case of robotised super-cowardice. The first-choice attacking full-backs have been injured. The key creative players, Martin Ødegaard and Bukayo Saka, are never on the pitch at the same time. City, by contrast, are in mid-season form. They have had an entire week to prepare, which is significant given the effective tactical plan in the Carabao Cup final. It will be fascinating to see if Arteta has been able to react to this, to concoct his own countermeasures.
This is the real nature of Sunday’s shootout, finely balanced and hostage to endless tactical variables. City will be favourites to win – on form and attacking strength and because they have a 12-time league title‑winning manager. Arsenal would take a draw, brave or otherwise; and a massive step towards crossing the line.
