Nine points clear in the Premier League, a Champions League quarter-final on Tuesday, and a dressing room that keeps having to answer the same question, are Arsenal actually going to do it this time?
Arsenal are Nine points clear, though City have a game in hand, and the mathematics of the title race still strongly favour Arteta’s side, but mathematics are not the full picture, and the full picture is more complicated than the table suggests. In the space of three weeks, Arsenal have lost a League Cup final to City, been eliminated from the FA Cup by Southampton and now face a Champions League quarter-final first leg against a Sporting side that has already proven it can conjure unlikely results.
The weight of what Arsenal are carrying is not insignificant, they last won the league in 2004, and the years since have provided enough near-misses and spectacular collapses to make even their most loyal supporters carry a quiet dread into each crucial week. That history is not rational and it does not belong on a tactics board, but it lives in the culture around the club, and cultures have a habit of surfacing in the moments when composure is most required, if you have any doubts just ask their rivals Tottenham.
What Arsenal have in their favour is the table itself, a squad with genuine depth, and a manager who has built something real over four years, something that does not unravel on the basis of two bad weeks, however bad the optics of those weeks might be. The title remains theirs to lose, and the Champions League remains genuinely open. But the version of Arsenal that beats Southampton on Saturday, wins in Lisbon on Tuesday, looks rather different from the one that played this weekend and which version shows up in April will determine everything.
