Arsenal lost to Watford on Tuesday night, but many of their rivals failed to win also, and we could have reason to not be overly pained by the results as a whole.
The Gunners were supposed to be licking their lips at the prospect of gaining an advantage over one or both of Liverpool and Chelsea, with the pair going head-to-head on Tuesday. The pair of course ended up sharing the spoils, and due to our loss, both gained a point on us!
Tottenham should also have been excited at the prospect of closing the gap on the league leaders Chelsea, but they also couldn’t bring the required game needed to beat, or even score against relegation-threatened Sunderland, and they will also have to lick their wounds at such a missed opportunity.
All eyes then turned to the Manchester Clubs, who had the joy of watching all of our sides fail to win their matches, and only one of them had the bottle to take advantage.
Manchester City came running out the gates, and stormed into a 3-0 lead in the opening half before going onto win 4-0. They had the toughest game on paper having travelled to a coming-into form side West Ham, but they discarded their challenge with ease, and have now joined Liverpool on 46 points, only one point behind second and third in the table.
Manchester United will be the most frustrated of all the top sides, having left themselves trailing the Champions League places by four points, when they should have been showing their rivals that they are in this race for the top four, and could have bridged the gap between second and sixth to only three points.
Chelsea and City will be laughing at the string of surprise failures inside the top six this week, and considering that Arsenal were the only side to actually lose, we will have to consider ourselves lucky not to have lost much in the race for the title or the top four.
Watching our team lose a game we would win 99 times out of 100 was painful, but the whole run of fixtures as a whole was simply so-so. Yes City closed our lead over fifth place to only one point, but I’m not concerned with the possibility of dropping out the top four come the end of the season.
The worry has to be that our next game however is a trip to Stamford Bridge, where we have conceded 10 goals without reply in recent years, and we now have to go there and target all three points, otherwise any hopes of winning that illustrious fourth Premier League title will be gone for another season.
What was worse? The loss or the full list of results? Can we pick ourselves up for a big performance against Chelsea on Saturday?
Pat J