A strange kind of rage is consuming English football. It is a collective fume, an impotent fury simmering around the fact that Arsenal are leading the Premier League and heading for their first title in 22 years and that, at the moment, it appears no one is good enough to stop them.
Brighton & Hove Albion manager Fabian Hurzeler, whose team lost to Arsenal 1-0 in a scrappy, bad-tempered game at the Amex Stadium on Wednesday night, became the latest to say that he would really much rather Mikel Arteta's side played a different way.
Presumably, by that he means he would rather Arsenal played in a way that would allow Brighton to beat them. Mean old Arsenal, having the temerity to beat teams like Brighton when they could just as easily hand them the three points by playing differently.
Maybe Hurzeler and every other Arsenal critic would rather that Arsenal played like the late-era Arsene Wenger sides that were lampooned for being beautifully weak and not having the ‘cojones’ to mix it with the best teams. Opponents preferred that Arsenal to this one.
It has all got, quite frankly, rather weird. During Arsenal’s gritty and scrappy victory on the south coast, the former West Ham, Newcastle and Crystal Palace boss Alan Pardew suggested on talkSPORT that if Arsenal won the league, there would have to be an asterisk next to their name for winning ugly.
There is a clue there to the wider antipathy towards Arsenal in the media and the country at large. Arsenal do not have a lot of ex-players fighting their corner. Think of the most prominent pundits on our televisions and not many are from an Arsenal background. Most are from teams who considered Arsenal their enemy.
‘Let’s face it,’ one former Arsenal player told me on Thursday, ‘Pardew and Arsene Wenger were practically judo partners on the touchline. They had plenty of run-ins. Pardew doesn’t like Arsenal at all. He doesn’t want them to win the title and he’s far from alone among those who work in television.’
Because is there really that much difference between the way Arsenal approach the game and the way so many of the title-winning teams of the past have done? They are hardly pioneers in eking out narrow victories on tough assignments.
‘Long throws and corner kicks?’ Neil Warnock, the manager who has taken charge of more games than any other in English football and is now back in charge at Torquay United at the age of 77, said with a smile on Thursday, ‘who would have thought it. That’ll do me.
‘What is happening here is simple. They have found a way of winning. It is not pretty but it is effective. I suspect that their own fans aren’t even that keen on it but they have not won the league for so long that they are not bothered. It’s hard to blame them for that.’
It was easy not to like the defensive, conservative style of the great Chelsea teams fashioned by Jose Mourinho but it was hard not to admire how defiant and formidable they were. It was impossible not to admire the brilliance of players like John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba.
The same, surely, should apply to Arsenal. Sure, some of their performances lately have been attritional but since when was putting on a defensive masterclass not part of the game? Gabriel’s display at the Amex Stadium on Wednesday was one of the best individual performances I have seen this season. Football isn’t just about Kevin De Bruyne and David Silva. It’s about stopping goals as well as scoring them.
‘What is happening to Arsenal at the moment feels like a witch hunt,’ the former Arsenal player told me. ‘It’s become a pantomime where Arsenal turn up and people boo. They are even talking, mid-season, about making new rules to stop Arsenal taking time at corners. Maybe other teams should just defend against them better.’
There’s something else at play here, too. Arsenal have not won the Premier League title for 22 years. Their desperation to win it this year, after three successive runner-up spots, has become a source of amusement for fans of other teams. They don’t want that fun to stop.
There are also many who have become so convinced of the narrative that Arsenal are going to ‘bottle’ their pursuit of the title this season that they cannot quite believe that their vision might be falling apart.
The reality is that there is nothing new in what Arsenal are doing, not even at Arsenal. George Graham’s title-winning sides of the late 80s and early 90s were not famed for their aesthetic qualities. They won games 1-0. They had some fine attacking players but their defence, the famous Arsenal back four, was the rock on which their successes were built.
As Arteta’s team have narrowed their focus, their play has become less expansive but it should not be ignored that no team has scored more goals than them in the top flight this season.
And only one team has scored more goals from open play than Arsenal. If Arteta’s team are so unutterably boring and dull, if they can only score from set-pieces, how did that happen?
It is a familiar story when a team is desperate to win a title. Often, style is the first victim. The result is all that matters.
Hurzeler was asked on Wednesday night whether the ends justified the means for Arsenal. He gave a verbal shrug and said he would never do what Arteta was doing. Maybe if he were challenging for a title, he might.
Maybe you remember 20 years ago, after Liverpool and Chelsea had engaged in a tumultuous Champions League semi-final, the Argentina World Cup-winning forward and former Real Madrid coach Jorge Valdano wrote contemptuously of what he had witnessed.
‘It’s not art,’ he wrote, ‘it's a s*** hanging from a stick. Chelsea and Liverpool are the clearest, most exaggerated example of the way football is going: very intense, very collective, very tactical, very physical, and very direct.
'The extreme control and seriousness with which both teams played the semi-final neutralised any creative licence, any moments of exquisite skill.’
It happens. Not every English title-winning side can be the Brazil team of 1970. Perhaps, English football has been spoiled in the 2020s with the beauty of a Manchester City team marshalled by the best coach in the world and lit up by talents like De Bruyne, John Stones, Erling Haaland, Jack Grealish, Bernardo Silva and Rodri.
Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are not that City team yet. But they are starting out on their journey. They have a title to win and it is hard to blame them for doing everything they can, within the rules of the game, to win it.
If they land the first one this May, maybe then we will see expression flourish again.
