So let’s just get this out there. First up Michael Oliver, who has ties to the United Arab Emirates, is appointed to referee Manchester City’s biggest game of the season just days after a human who looks like Keir Starmer (there is no proof of this either way) is seen in an Arsenal box, while the UK government is furiously back-channelling UAE trade relations. We’re through the looking-glass here people, where even the looking-glass is made of other looking-glasses, possibly in Nyon and probably by satanists.
Meanwhile we’re meant to be surprised that VAR didn’t see anything wrong with Erling Haaland throwing the ball at Gabriel Magalhães’s head (subplot: Brazil recently banned the use of X) as the UK government seeks a Norway-style deal to covertly sneak back into the EU. You do the algebra, sheeple.
Frankly some of us saw all this coming when Jarred Gillett, an Australian, was appointed to referee the north London derby against Spurs who are managed by an Australian, whose government literally this weekend signed an economic partnership with: Abu Dhabi. While we’re on it, you know who else was Australian? Adolf Hitler.
OK, OK, OK. The madness is out there if you want it. The madness is really quite tempting because it’s kind of a community vibe and a good way to meet people online and it also makes it feel as though life, which makes absolutely no sense at all, actually has a narrative and shape.
Admittedly this does require the holding of contradictory beliefs and the glossing of certain inconvenient facts. For example, if Oliver is basically a Sky Blue agent, and if we can please accept that chucking the ball away on a yellow is dopey, then the only unarguably key terrible decision during Manchester City versus Arsenal was Oliver calling Kyle Walker over to speak to him and then watching on as Arsenal scored an excellent quick-thinking goal via that exact same channel of vacated space. Which is actually quite funny in its sheer howling clumsiness, like being ordered to stop your car by the police who then give you a parking ticket.
Zoom out a little and there are two real-life problems with this stuff, the big ongoing conspiracy game beyond the game that is now a Premier League staple. First, feeling cheated is also often rooted in fact, if not always the most appealing ones. Going down this line often lets people get away with actual, solvable incompetence and stupidity.
In the case of Sunday’s game, the PGMOL and Premier League opened the door to this stuff with two terrible decisions. First, there is no way on this earth or any other that English referees should be off taking paid employment from a state that owns one of the clubs they routinely officiate. This is not to suggest referees are actually corrupt (they’re really not), but appearance is everything and this is mind-bogglingly careless. You could make a case that Howard Webb and anyone else involved at that level should walk now purely on the basis of allowing this to happen.
Then, of course, the Premier League invited exactly this kind of fraying at the edges when it allowed governments to own its member clubs, but that’s a much longer story. Either way, a pretty good rule here is always, always, when it comes to football governance, go with incompetence first. You think these people could actually organise an international conspiracy without ballsing that up too?
But the real issue here, the thing that has got a little lost in the wall of rage, is that this was a very good, engrossing game of football. Most of all it was a good game for Arsenal, who showed great fortitude and skill to recover from going a goal down after nine minutes away to the best team on the planet, and from there to come within moments of victory despite having lost a player in the first half. City’s salvaging of a point was also real (they have a genuine champion spirit) and so were their heartfelt celebrations, the moaning about “dark arts” after drawing with 10 men. This is a compliment. Players know.
Just as interesting is the way Arsenal’s skill at defending has become an issue. There is confusion here. Somehow being good at defending is being cast as controversial or nihilistic, even some kind of fatal hubristic flaw. True, Arsenal celebrate defending more than any other team, to the extent that we can perhaps now look forward to a time when defenders start refusing to celebrate certain tackles and blocks out of respect for former clubs, and are hailed as “classy” as a result.
But it also seems odd to assume defending is not the absolute sandwich bread of elite football, or that being the best defensive team in the league is not a significant shift of power. The fact so many people consume football remotely or in clips is probably part of this. In the flesh, in the stadium, watching the full 90 minutes on a screen undistracted, high-class defending is one of most thrilling and engaging parts of sport.
Arsenal’s defending on Sunday afternoon wasn’t just beautiful to watch, every part functioning in concert, the right City players given space, the dangerous ones closed down, right up to the moment City cracked this code and managed to get Jack Grealish into the right spot. It is also the part that gives the rest of the game substance, that ennobles attacking moments and makes them robust, that made Erling Haaland’s goal and the work in creating it from Savinho so special, because it came against that defence. Take away this skill, wail over “the dark arts” too much and the spectacle will ultimately lose meaning.
Pep Guardiola knows this, of course. His approach has always been about control, possession as first and foremost a defensive tool. He will admire the job his protege did at the Etihad. Arsenal came to Manchester still missing Martin Ødegaard, their most important “flow” player, footballing swarfega, the lubricant that makes their entire attacking game function.
Is it a flaw to be so reliant on one player? No! Sport is meant to be like this. It’s supposed to involve managing weak spots. Most clubs have internal budget limits, pockets that end somewhere. This is the best part of the financial rules. They make management more of a feat. Defending is also one part of the game where Arsenal are now better than City. They came to Manchester with 11 clean sheets in their last 14 Premier League games. Why would anyone not play to that strength? This was a logical approach from Mikel Arteta.
Other things were good, too. Oliver may have pre-assisted Arsenal’s equalising goal, but Gabriel Martinelli was already pulling very wide as a pre-set tactic to disconcert Walker before he went inside as a midfield “underlap”. It was smart play. Jurriën Timber was exceptional. Kai Havertz worked like a maniac.
And looking forward, Arsenal also flagged some of City’s own unresolved issues at what is still an early stage in the season. Walker spent most of the game running around like a man who has lost his keys. Two Arsenal goals made it seven games since City’s last league clean sheet at home. The attack is also an oddity so far. Jérémy Doku still looks like a man playing his own game of dribble ball while an actual football match happens all around him. Only Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne and Mateo Kovacic have scored for City this season and it’s nearly October.
Guardiola is very good at solving these issues on the hoof. This will, as ever, be a different City team in January. But whatever happens now will also require adjustments to make up for the lengthy absence of Rodri after his serious knee injury. In many ways, this was the key element of Sunday’s game. City have a history of dropping points without their stellar central presence. They were winning on Sunday until Rodri went off.
Handily, the run of games coming up isn’t the most obviously testing. It still seems likely City’s title run will be decided by a spell of nine league games from 25 January that includes visits from Chelsea, Newcastle, Liverpool, and trips to Arsenal, Tottenham, Nottingham Forest and Manchester United. But Sunday was evidence that Arsenal have the will to chase them to the line again.
The wider narrative isn’t all fiction. The Premier League really is hostage to interests, lobbying, idiocy and incompetence. The day-to-day bit, the refs bit, the hands-inside-the-cake-mix stuff; perhaps not so much. For now we can at least take pleasure in an angry, accusatory, defensively venal afternoon of parity.
