Oh for heavens’s sake, get a room. Actually don’t. This is, on reflection, a global spectator sport. But show a little restraint. People are watching. Including, it seemed for much of the first half at the London Stadium, the entire West Ham defence.
There were times during those 49 wild minutes when Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard seemed to be playing pretty much in the same pocket of air, like a pair of hummingbirds, beautifully conjoined.
Footballers who work together like this are often said to have an understanding or a relationship. This was the real thing. You complete me. No, seriously. Just look at the numbers.
This was Ødegaard’s third start in eight days since slipping back into the team just before the international break. There had been so much talk about what his return might mean, with all due caution about overloading one player with superhero problem‑solving powers. But the team really has bloomed under his hand, or in Saka’s case rebloomed, bloomed a little more.
By the break here Arsenal were running at 13 goals in their last two and a half games, nine of them assisted or scored by Saka and Ødegaard, with Saka’s personal tally three goals and four assists. Ødegaard’s return hasn’t just been a boost. This has been a homecoming. It’s the end of The Railway Children out there. Daddy’s back, walking out of the steam in his tweed coat and homburg hat. And everything’s going to be different now.
At least, it is against this West Ham defence. For long periods in that first half the home team simply didn’t apply any resistance to this process, reduced to the football equivalent of one of those paper‑thin wasabi seaweed crackers, all branding and plastic, a little colouring and sheen, but basically not really there.
By half-time Saka and Ødegaard had taken 60 touches between them, just under a third of West Ham’s total from one to 11. Those are all touches near your goal, by the best players in the opposition team, often in space, allowed to dream and twirl and basically dance in each other’s eyeline.
Around this Arsenal and West Ham dished up a genuinely crazy game of football. It took 10 minutes to open the scoring. Pablo Sanz, West Ham’s designated set-piece sidekick, had appeared next to Julen Lopetegui for Arsenal’s first corner, matching up the Arteta‑Tover double act. As the ball was sent fizzing into the back of the West Ham net Sanz just turned and walked back, shoulders hunched, and it really is a long way in this ground, the walk of set‑piece shame.
The delivery from Saka was a flat, hard skimmer. Arsenal had lumped the back post with the usual knot of black shirts, kettling West Ham in their own area. There was the familiar phalanx advance as the ball came in, all blocks and closed lanes, players there just to eat up space while Gabriel, the running back in this scrimmage, goes hunting for the ball. His marker Michail Antonio was still pressing through the crowd like a flustered shopper as the ball was headed past Lukasz Fabianski.
The London Stadium had been at its cavernous best at kick-off, a vast hanger of cold, white light, still weirdly angled, as though someone has just jammed this giant Lego structure down on its base and crunched it about until it sticks.
At which point, enter: the madness. By half-time the scoreline read West Ham 2-5 Arsenal, as it would stay to the end, five of those goals in the space of 13 minutes.
Arsenal’s second was the high point of the Ødegaard-Saka fever, a goal so elegant it felt almost sarcastic. Saka started and ended the key combination, cutting inside down one of those wormholes that is somehow invisible to every opponent, laying the ball back to Ødegaard, then carrying on because he knows now what happens when you do this.
The pass back into Saka’s path was a thing of beauty, floated like a soap bubble through the damp Stratford air, and also through the human props posing as West Ham defenders. Saka took the ball on his thigh then laid it sideways to Leandro Trossard to score.
Six minutes later it was Saka again, this time slaloming through the claret flags and winning a penalty kick that he then presented to Ødegaard, not actually down on one knee in the restaurant but almost. Ødegaard duly buried it.
That made it a 34-minute hat‑trick of goal involvements for Saka, which presumably means he gets to take home the pump that blew up the match ball. Arsenal’s fourth two minutes later was more fine play but also a little sickly because it involved West Ham just standing and watching Trossard’s perfect pass over the top for Kai Havertz. Even training cones have some kind of presence. This was frankly a disgrace to the cone.
West Ham pulled a couple of goals back. Saka put away a penalty right on half-time after Fabianski decided to deal with another inswinging corner by punching Gabriel in the head. Go for the high ball, but it’s not a free hit. This isn’t purge night.
And that was pretty much that, prelude to a languid postcoital cheroot of a second half. Ground may have been lost in the meantime. But this felt like the full resumption of a beautiful friendship.
