By Tony Attwood
One of the themes that we have developed on Untold Arsenal is that even the most successful clubs in the Premier League get occasional “blips” – which is to say runs of anything between two and five games in which they draw or even lose games that we would have expected them to win. The teams that progress and eventually win the Premier League are not those which have no blips, but rather those that recover from the blips after two or three games and then go back to win after win after win. And indeed those that have only one or two such series of games.
It is a curious factor in football (although admittedly one that you can find the occasional exception for) that the clubs that slip back to second or third place or even lower don’t recover so quickly from the blips. The mark of champions is not that they don’t get blips, but that they get fewer of them, and they recover more quickly.
Indeed even in the unbeaten season, Arsenal had some blips such as
| 13 Sep 2003 | Arsenal v Portsmouth | Drew | 1-1 | Premier League |
| 17 Sep 2003 | Arsenal v Inter Milano | Lost | 0-3 | Champions League |
| 21 Sep 2003 | Manchester United v Arsenal | Drew | 0-0 | Premier League |
And then again near the end of the season:
| 24 Mar 2004 | Chelsea v Arsenal | Drew | 1-1 | Champions League |
| 28 Mar 2004 | Arsenal v Manchester United | Drew | 1-1 | Premier League |
| 03 Apr 2004 | Arsenal v Manchester United | Lost | 0-1 | FA Cup |
| 06 Apr 2004 | Arsenal v Chelsea | Lost | 1-2 | Champions League |
Of course, the point there was that one of the Manchester United games was in the FA Cup and both the Chelsea games were in the Champions League – so no harm done to our league position.
Which raises the question, are Arsenal being distracted by the Champions League in this season?
Certainly, this season there can be nothing to complain about on the European front with six successive victories over Bilbao, Olympiakos, Atletico Madrid, Slavia Prague and Bayern Munich (the latter we may note being nine points clear at the top of the German league table) and Club Brugge.
But then, after all that, in the game against Wolverhampton, Arsenal did not look like the team that had romped its way through the Champions League to such a degree that they have qualified for the next round with two games spare.
Now one of these two remaining games is at home to Kairat a team that plays in Kazakhstan Premier League, and since theirs is a programme that runs from the spring to the late autumn in UK terms, they know they have just qualified for next season’s Champions League by winning their league. I am sure they will have a very good off-season rest, and not be particularly bothered by having to play in the Champions League through to December 2026, when otherwise they would all be at home with their feet up, celebrating whatever it is they celebrate at that time of year.
And this despite the fact that they are in fact bottom of the Champions League table with one win and five defeats, so even a playoff place in the next round is way out of reach.
It is of course a policy of many cup competitions that ever club that meets the primary criteria (for example, in Euope, playing in the top division of the national professional or semi-pro league, BS playing in any adult league and having a ground that charges admission for matches, and being members of the FA, for the FA Cup). Meet those conditions, and have a playable pitch and you are in. (Actually, I may have missed out a couple of extra specific pointers, but that is the general idea).
But really that is the fun of the FA Cup, and it does seem to me a bit odd that we do have clubs which come (though no fault of their own) from weaker leagues and so have weaker teams who know that they are going to lose, most of, if not all, of their games in the Champions League.
However, Uefa has declared aim of making the Champs League open to every country if they do have a league of their own, so that is a regulation that we are stuck with.
So Arsenal might win all of their eight qualifying matches. I hope they do. But I do feel a little something for these clubs from tiny leagues and semi-pro players, forced to travel across the continent, just to be beaten..
