By Tony Attwood
12 games without a defeat, and then we lose one. Yes, if someone had said we might be in that situation, and top of the league, across the end of 2025 and start of 2026, I’d have said it was going to be a good season. And it has been, and still is.
And if anyone said, those referee previews do give us a bit of a warning, I’d hjave taken that as a positive comment too, although I wish it were not so. But our statistics about that referee did turn out to be relevant.
But there we are: after ten wins and two draws we lose a game by one goal – and that scored very late on. It happens, and thanks to all those previous results, we are still top of the league. Indeed, if anyone had said, at the start of the season, that come late January Arsenal would be four points clear at the top of the league as we approached the end of January, I wold have said, “Well that would be wonderful, but I am not sure it will happen.”
So now we have just slipped back to only four points clear, and it feels like it is not enough. Not enough protection againsts all the players ManC can throw in against us, and all the money they can use to reward those players for their successes, given that there is still no end in sight to the court case against them.
Which leads to the second point – if anyone had said that the court case against ManC would still be running without any punishment in January 2026, I would have said, “even the Football League can’t be that inept.” Again, how wrong I would have been.
Somehow I believed that the League could and would deal with Manc and their financial behaviour, but it seems not. So what I didn’t foresee was that ManC would have a weapon to use against s the rest of the league, and the League would be stupid enough to allow them to use it. To allow them, simply, to put in a whole raft of appeals and say, “and when you have finished dealing with those, if you still don’t withdraw the case, we’ve got another truckload outside.
So I admit it, my level of predictive ability is pretty naff. And all I can hope is that this was an off day for Arsenal, and that in the coming games the team will return to its normal dominance. The media call Arsenal “nervy” and “over cautious” and “over emotional” and “the worst version of themselves” – and all those three comments come in the headlines of just one newspaper – The Teleegraph. And that’s not all, for also in the same paper, there is “Patrick Vieira questions Arsenal’s bottle as team booed after Man Utd defeat.”
I thought such booing as there was, was an ironic jest at the expense of Tottenham, or directed at the referee, but of course, in football you are only as good as your last match, and so now the league table counts for nothing, even thought it shows Arsenal four points clear of the second and third team and 12 points clear of the fourth team. Had anyone who supports Arsenal been offered this table of the league after 23 games surely they would have greeted it with open arms.
So the Guardian says “Arsenal title tilt stalls” because Arsenal have lost one match. By my rekoning Arsenal have played 34 league and cup games this season and lost three all told – a record that every other club in the Premier League would willingly swap for their own achievements.
The club is back in the stadium on Wednesday playing Kairat of the Kazakhstan Premier League – a league which runs through the spring, summer and autumn, and so hasn’t actually started yet. And because Arsenal have won seven out of seven in the Champions League this season, the result doesn’t even matter. Which seems to me to put yesterday’s defeat into perspective.
Of course, Manchester United fans celebrated like mad yesterday because this seaon they have already lost five league games and another defeat would have taken them down to the same level as Chelsea.
So Arsenal are top of the league by four points, and are certain to be in the knockout stages of the Champions League, which is more than can be said for Manchester City, Tottenham Ho, Barcelona and PSG – each of whom might make it into the next round, but there is no certainty; they might be in the play-offs.
Of course I am upset about the result yesterday, but the broader context still makes me smile, whichever league table I look at this morning.
