Whisper It Quietly, This Arsenal FC Side Is The Real Deal

After Arsenal FC’s impressive 3-0 win over Brentford FC, it was the opposing manager who said it.

“They must be title contenders,” Thomas Frank told the media, “from what I’ve seen in the seven games, I think they’ve been very good: they’ve won fair and square in six and the other game could have gone either way.”

The Dane wasn’t wrong, the Gunners have been the Premier League’s most impressive team so far this season.

It’s not so much the teams they’ve beaten, which have tended to be those they’d be favorites against, it is the manner of the victories.

Last season Arsenal was battered 3-0 at Crystal Palace and fell to a 2-0 defeat by Brentford. But this year they confidently dispatched both of them, looking cohesive and assured in the process.

When defeat did finally come, against Manchester United, it was hardly a disgrace. The Gunners were the better team for the majority of the game, unlucky to be denied the lead by a VAR decision and then hit with a couple of sucker punches.

As Frank pointed out, this is an Arsenal team that has both matured and provided the platform for newcomers to thrive.

“[Bukayo] Saka and [Martin] Ødegaard are a year older,” the Brentford boss added, “ Saliba, he’s going to be a full international player for France, I’m sure. He’ll start for that team and that’s a strong international team [and Gabriel] Jesus, wow, what a player … it’s nothing against [Manchester] City but sometimes it clicks in a different environment.”

However, even Arsenal fans giddy with excitement will admit; they’ve had this feeling before.

The late Wenger years were dotted with runs of results that looked like the beginning of the club who were title challengers again and since Mikel Arteta took over there have been moments of similar momentum.

Most recent in the memory of Gunners’ fans is last season’s blistering run to the brink of Champions League qualification.

Having gone on a four-game winning streak, which included victories away to Chelsea and at home to Manchester United, the Gunners succumbed to back-to-back defeats against bitter rivals Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United.

The losses turned a relatively comfortable advantage in the race for the fourth Champions League place into needing a favor from already relegated side Norwich City to land the spot.

Unsurprisingly, the Canaries didn’t deliver and Arsenal slumped to fifth place.

This pattern of results in the final seven games of the season did not occur in isolation, they were an accurate representation of what happened across the 38 games of the campaign.

A five-game winning streak in February and March was followed by three back-to-back losses in April, while triple victories in September and October were immediately followed by similar runs of results.

They are the hallmarks of a streaky side, when things go well, success looked inevitable, but facing adversity and the negative rut appears insurmountable.

The other way to interpret this was that it was evidence of inexperience. At just 24, Arsenal’s average age is amongst the youngest in the league, with some players, like Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli, barely out of their teens.

It’s harder to overcome adversity when you don’t have experience doing so.

Take Liverpool, a team on the other end of the spectrum with an average age of 26 and the majority of the first team in their 30s.

Last season, they fell behind in each of their final four games, on three occasions they recovered to draw the game the other match they drew.

Being able to steady themselves from the setback and grind out a win requires deep confidence, not impossible for young players to have, but certainly helped by having a decade of professional soccer under your belt.

Frank correctly highlighted that there is a little more of that in the Arsenal changing room these days. Players have another year under their belts, experience which will prepare them better for this campaign’s challenges.

You could argue they are already demonstrating that knowledge. Arsenal was much criticized for ‘over celebrating’ a 2-1 comeback win against Fulham, but such results are significant for a group who has less experience than teams like Manchester City and Liverpool in winning from behind.

The plan for peaking

They will need it because, as Mikel Arteta explained in revealing comments after the disappointing end to last season, the plan is not to buy this experience but to have the team mature together.

“The decision we made last summer [was] that, if we are going to get to a certain level, normally [players] get to that level in the peak of their careers. Obviously [our players] are not there, but they are moving fast and they are giving us hope with them, we can reach the level we want,” he said.

This is not a new philosophy at the club, great Arsenal teams were built on the premise of having players like Thierry Henry hit their peak alongside Kolo Toure and Robert Pires, before being sold to make way for the next generation.

The problem was the outstanding talents who came after the 2003-04 invincible league title winners got frustrated and left before success for the group materialized.

From Robert Van Persie to Samir Nasri, Cesc Fabregas to Aaron Ramsey players felt they had to leave to achieve their goals and no Arsenal team in the past twenty years has been able to peak together.

It’s maybe why, towards the end of his tenure, long-time manager Arsene Wenger began to abandon this philosophy and spend huge sums on established stars like Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil, a plan equally doomed to failure.

Given how many times Arsenal fans have been here before they are probably sceptical, but, whisper it, this time things look different.