As many of you will know (and some are more sensitive of them than others), my opinion of the title race is that Arsenal might not quite have the mentality to get over the line.
Never meant as an insult.
Simply an observation of where the youngest squad in the division might be at in their development, and an acknowledgement of the standards Man City have set in previous seasons.
Liverpool, as an example, won every League game last season from January onwards apart from three draws, losing zero and that still wasn’t enough to be Champions.
Don’t get confused though, that doesn’t mean the Gunners both collectively and individually haven’t taken huge strides this campaign.
Whatever happens no one can take that away from Mikel Arteta.
You either bring in proven leaders (we have tried that with a few signings ) or you have to learn from your own experience.
The 1-0 scoreline at the King Power didn’t give justice to how one sided the game was.
Yet to go away from home in the Premiership and ensure your keeper doesn’t have to make a save certainly takes some doing.
While we should have killed the match off, with such a narrow lead Leicester only needed that one second.
Yet that last push from the Foxes never came, they huffed and puffed but there really was no kitchen sink being thrown at us.
Arsenal are now comfortable if they have to see out games, to play out narrow wins, to fight for their three points, to have the game management to know how to slow things down, etc.
Our manager knows when to make subs who are designed to protect what they have.
On Saturday, Tomiyasu and Partey were reliable defensive options from the bench who could be trusted to see things out. Tierney and Holding have also been asked to do that in narrow wins.
This weekend wasn’t a one off.
Victories at Selhurst Park, Molineux, Stamford Bridge, Elland Road, the Lane …. all had aspects of grit and fight.
It’s not as celebrated as free flowing football or individual skill, but make no mistake it’s as much a factor as anything else for us being top of the Prem.
It’s also an art form.
A quality we have lacked for years, even in Mr Wenger’s final years.
Ex-players have claimed that our ex-boss had such belief in his ethos he wouldn’t tactically change no matter the opposition or score line.
The Frenchman himself claimed that injuries led to the 2005 FA Cup Final being one of the rare occasions he sacrificed his principles for the sake of a one off result.
So many Gooners were brought up seeing our team 3-1 up and still throwing bodies forward in the last 10 minutes. Sometimes that led to more goals, other times it allowed the opposition back into things.
It feels strange now to trust Arsenal to see out a 1-0 win, it almost feels un-Arsenal-like. Of course it used to be a big part of our history.
That’s why performances at Goodison Park, and at home to Brentford and Man City were such a shock, to see our defenders being bullied contradicted everything we had seen since August.
As we approach ‘squeaky bum time’, our back 5 will take massive value from that clean sheet.
We can’t win the title defending how we have in the 5 encounters heading into the weekend but we can if we defend how we have for the majority of this season.
Arsenal have played beautiful football this season but equally can now win ugly.
Which in a weird way is just as satisfying
Dan