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4 hours ago
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What the world needs now is one last hot take on Arsenal and the Champions League final before we are all brought together in beautiful symbiotic harmony by the World Cup.
Key questions such as: was it a good game? Was this the perfect way to take on the best midfield and attack in world football or the ultimate illustration of footballing cowardice? Why didn’t all the people in the UK want Arsenal to win? Why did some Arsenal fans find that annoying? Could it possibly be that people are different and want different things from football matches they consume in very different ways?
The big question is about Arsenal’s approach to the final. I am not totally comfortable saying the words “game state” out loud, but it is clear Mikel Arteta had a decision to make once Arsenal went 1-0 up after six minutes. A decision, we presume, he had made a long time before Kai Havertz roofed it over Matvey Safonov and into the Paris Saint-Germain goal.
Does he keep attacking or does he take the best defence in the world, who have won the Premier League by being defensively brilliant, and see whether PSG can break them down? It seems the most sensible decision he could make at that time.
It is not without risks. Not having the ball is physically and mentally exhausting. PSG, despite not creating a clear chance in the first half, were so close with quite a few final balls. That is the hard bit of breaking down a low block: choosing when to try the difficult pass, choosing who makes it, choosing who receives it. That was this game in microcosm: move the defence around until a tiny gap appears.
Parking the bus is often used as a criticism. But parking a bus is presumably incredibly difficult – as is maintaining your shape, keeping your discipline and deciding when you have to go to ground to block or make a last-ditch tackle. So maybe Arsenal did park the bus and maybe we’ve got that phrase wrong all along.
But aren’t Arsenal the best team in the best league in the world? Surely they can offer more than that? It’s an understandable question. This Arsenal team were not going to go all-out attack, especially once they had a lead. So what’s the choice? Defend as they did or attack 5% or 10% more? What does that look like? And do you by definition leave yourself 5% or 10% more open, making those PSG final balls 5%-10% easier? Arsenal had the only other clear chance in the first half. It was almost perfect.
It is fair to criticise Arteta’s substitutions and their inability to change things after the equaliser, but that is perhaps as much down to the fact that despite building a brilliant squad, with two excellent players in each position, they are a galático or two, or three, behind PSG.
And it didn’t work. Eventually a through ball pierced the backline and Cristhian Mosquera fouled Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. PSG are better at football. That’s quite a key part in all of this.
It feels as if this was Arteta’s best plan for winning the Champions League and to be clear I did not want Arsenal to win this game (although I’m not entirely sure I wanted PSG and their project to win it either).
Was it a good game? Once Arsenal scored, I was completely invested in watching the best attack try to break down the best defence. Yet there is a high chance I’ve watched very similar games with teams in different shirts in different competitions and found them insipidly boring. There is a high chance I’ll watch England struggle to break down a low block in a few weeks’ time and start moaning about handbrakes (Handbremse, if you want to yell at Thomas Tuchel in his native tongue). I have four decades of match-worn scars watching the Three Lions do that.
We don’t approach every game in the same way. Had this been Monday Night Football, after watching nine Premier League matches and a Cambridge game I’d have been checking my algorithm or hanging up the washing by the second half. But I gave it my full attention and found it compelling.
Enjoying this game doesn’t mean you want every match to be like that. You don’t need to compare it with the PSG-Bayern Munich first leg. You probably don’t eat the same food at every meal. You can enjoy eggs and enjoy Haribo, ideally separately.
There is always a danger I just want to take a different view on this game to appear more intelligent than I am, to be the thinking man’s observer of football. Do I want a thousand likes? Or just a WhatsApp from Rory Smith agreeing with me? Hopefully, this is my truth.
Then to the endless wider reaction. Enter the bantersphere. You may live an Instagram-free life and just be left to develop your own opinions or you may find yourself doomscrolling on the toilet. What does that ubiquitous Manchester City fan with his bottle think? Oh, it’s my colleagues Jason Cundy and Gabby Agbonlahor dancing around the TalkSport office in PSG shirts.
What does Chris Sutton think about what Martin Keown thinks about what Jack Whitehall thinks about what Jeff Stelling thinks about Arsenal? Perhaps you’re agreeing with Ollie Holt that it’s sad that not every English person wanted Arsenal to win. You could be drowning in your own myopic club podcasts or listening to and shouting at mine.
Whatever your view of the final, you don’t have to go out of your way to find an opinion you will find annoying. Perhaps this article is the very thing. Then you have a choice: to quietly disagree and put your phone away or yell back. Perhaps football has always been this way.
Even if you just didn’t get a dopamine hit when you yelled it to yourself in your living room, you were still a content creator. Now it’s just created for all of us, by all of us, all the time, and not even Arteta can park a big enough bus to keep it out.
