Our visit to the Amex on Saturday was supposed to be about righting wrongs, about taking a measure of revenge for the points stolen from us in north London earlier in the season.
In the end, all we managed was to replace one injustice with another; a fresh controversy to add to the pile that has grown steadily in the last 18 months or so. I’m a bit jaded by it all.
Much of the discourse around the game has been about whether Arsenal ‘deserved’ the win, about whether they ‘did enough’ to get three points. It’s a nonsense argument. Winning football matches has never been about what you deserve – just ask Arsene Wenger. He built teams the right way, he played beautiful football and, in the second half of his tenure, he had precious little to show for it, usurped by teams who simply made their own rules.
That is all to say, goals win football matches. There are no points for ‘deserving’ anything. The fact is, up until Anthony Taylor decided to intervene with the penalty call, Arsenal were a goal up and hadn’t been troubled by Brighton in any meaningful way. Taylor gifted them a way back into the match, the impetus and, ultimately, a point. It’s not the first time we have said that this season.
As to the decision itself, it’s clearly a farce. Taylor, a referee with a lot of experience, was conned by Joao Pedro’s feigned cries of pain. Had he simply got on with the game, he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. That’s why players overreact, feign injury, and dramatise all contact – it’s worth it. As to the VAR, how they managed to miss William Saliba touching the ball before the clash of heads, I’ll never know. I’ve given up complaining, they’re just shit.
Of course, leaving aside the penalty, there is plenty you can pick over from an Arsenal point of view. In the second period, we struggled to create enough, we didn’t carry enough threat, and we didn’t do a good enough job of keeping possession. There were moments here and there but we didn’t really look like scoring a second goal.
Given how many injuries and absences we are carrying at the moment, that is perhaps not a surprise but it feels like we are limping our way through matches right now and I don’t see the situation improving in the near term. In fact, with Ethan Nwaneri’s first-half injury, our situation is already demonstrably worse than it was.
Making a move in the transfer window is now an absolute imperative. There is no more ‘we’ll get the best out of the squad we have’ because that squad is painfully thin, tired, and lacking the spark we need to kill off games.
Coming away from Brentford and Brighton inside three days with six points would have been huge for us. It would likely not have made a difference to the Premier League title race in any substantive way but it would have been important to keep taking advantage of the slips and stumbles of the sides around us.
As it is, four points from those two matches is not a disaster but the manner of the draw a Brighton yet again leaves a bitter taste. I get that our players are tired but we also aren’t seeing enough from the likes of Leandro Trossard, Mikel Merino and Gabriel Martinelli. Again, I accept there is an element of square pegs and round holes, as well as injury issues elsewhere in the squad that play a part but we really do need more in these tight matches.
The manager now has to look for solutions outside the club. If finances are an issue, and I suspect they are, they can get creative with loans. We have more and more games coming this month and we desperately need some bodies to bear some of the brunt. Not just anybody, I get that, but we can’t seriously be in a situation where there is no-one in world football who can do a job for us, even on a short-term deal.
To that end, the Brighton match should focus minds. We were short of spark, short of ideas, and full of lethargy in the second half. We can’t go on like this because teams with less on their plate will take advantage. Failing that, of course, referees will just gift them points.
All told, it was a hugely frustrating end to what was shaping up to be a positive week. Bad performances are one thing but having such unprecedented decisions go against us again and again is exhausting. All we can do is hope our luck turns.
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