The 2022/23 Premier League campaign drew to a close on Sunday as Arsenal concluded their splendid season with a 5-0 mauling of Wolves on a sun-soaked early summer’s evening in North London. The Gunners already knew they were guaranteed a second place finish but a win would see Mikel Arteta’s side beat their previous Emirates era points tally by a point (83 points achieved in 2007/08) and do that they did. 

Arteta named an unchanged starting eleven from the side that finally conceded the title to the (alleged) financial dopers of East Manchester at Forest last week. That has been a common theme for Arsenal this season, Arteta has made just 38 alterations to his 38 starting line ups this campaign which is the lowest in the division. Compare that to a certain mid table club in SW3 who have made a whopping 131 tinkers to their comical excuse for a football team. We got off to a flyer as the soon-to-be departing Granit Xhaka nodded us into an early lead following an excellent cross from Gabriel Jesús from the right-hand side. It has been widely reported that the Swiss international will be signing for Bayer Leverkusen after seven rollercoaster years in North London. Few players have divided opinion quite like Xhaka, the outrageous character assassination he has endured from the parasitical English media, most notably the odious Gary Neville, most definitely affected him to some extent. And who can blame him? Xhaka accrued an unfair reputation as a dirty player who often lunged into reckless tackles. He was once branded by Neville as “a brainless idiot” “(ironic) and “uncoachable”. You decide which of these comments is the most idiotic. But Granit soon had another goal on his leaving party. Saka drove into the box, his cross took a nick off a Wolverhampton defender, and Xhaka passed the ball into the net to double his tally. 

Arsenal were now in party mode and their opponents were on the beach. We made it three on the half hour following some precise exchanges between Trossard and Ødegaard. It was the Belgian whose ninth assist of the season found Saka, who took one touch to push the ball onto his left peg before blasting an emphatic finish into the far bottom corner. Not a bad way to celebrate signing a new contract. We were well and truly on Easy Street. 

No changes were made at the break as we looked to add to our lead. We thought we had a fourth after Partey scrambled home following a corner but it was disallowed for a push on Jose Sá from Ben White. Replays showed VAR had got it right for a change. But moments later we did have a fourth. Jorginho played a sumptuous ball over the top for Trossard to run onto. He checked his run a couple of times, and swung in a teasing cross to the far post with his “weak foot” and Jesús was there to head home from a difficult angle. A really high quality goal from start to finish. We made a few subs, the game plodded along at the pace you would expect for a dead rubber game on the final day but there was time for a fifth as Jakub Kiwior notched his first goal for the club, scrambling in from a corner. Sá probably should’ve kept it out, and you could argue it was actually an own goal but life is too short for all that faff and nonsense. That was our eighty-eighth goal in the league this season which is a club record for a 38 game season. Our 19^th different scorer too. Not too shabby.

So there we have it, another season done and dusted. A season where we led the way for some 249 days before the Financial Fair Play Oil Riggers of Middle East Manchester, eventually showed their quality. But the history books will read: The Arsenal in Second place with 84 points, 26 wins, 6 draws and 6 defeats. We are finally out of the Thursday Night Ropey League and after a long exile we are back in the Mostly Not Champions League which is no longer brought to you by Gazprom. We collectively look forward to being drawn in a group with our old friends Bayern Munich, Barcelona and of course, Olympiakos. Is that possible? Well no, but I’m sure those honourable trustworthy guys over at UEFA will get the hot balls out. To be perfectly honest we’ve been out of it for so long we’ll probably turn up on a Thursday and go to Baku instead of Barcelona. But at least we will be in it, and we didn’t make a song and dance about it unlike the Marshdwellers did a year ago. I wonder what European competition they’ll be in next year. Anyone know? Thankfully the continent will be safe from those gormless oddballs for the next twelve months. 

I suppose the end of a season does provide an opportunity for some evaluation. Did we achieve our preseason objective of finishing in the top four? Yes. With quite some distinction. Have we progressed from the previous season? Massively. Are we coming out of the campaign with a touch of disappointment we did not achieve more? Somewhat, yes. It goes without saying that if you had offered any rational Arsenal fan second place and a title challenge before the season began you would’ve been laughed at even by the most optimistic Gooner. But then the season kicked off and right from the first minute of that warm evening at Selhurst Park we could all see something had shifted in these players. We were playing with a swagger we had not seen at this club for bordering on two decades. And we demonstrated this was no fluke. We won our first five games for the first time in a long time. Nine of the first ten became sixteen out of nineteen. Fifty points won from a possible fifty-seven. Not even The Invincibles could boast such a rapid start. Had we continued at the same rate for the second half of the campaign we would’ve won the title by a comfortable margin. It was an incredible ride until the start of April and that ought to be remembered. Throughout the season we on GHF have basked in the warm glow of being proud supporters of a club which is well and truly on the up after a gradual but elongated demise. We have perhaps grown closer as a small community in the ocean that is the Arsenal universe. Pre-match we met up with GSD (as illustrated above) and we all enjoyed great conversations and laughs on both Arsenal and non-Arsenal related topics. And this is what football is about; bringing people together who would otherwise be strangers to one another. And I suppose this has been aided by the positive vibes around our club right now. 

I will finish by wishing you all an enjoyable summer. Try not to spend all day refreshing Arsenal NewsNow waiting to see if we’ve agreed a fee for Gonzalo Higuain or if Yann M’Villa has completed his medical yet. Now we face the prospect of two long months without The Arsenal and we must attempt to lead lives outside of the seasonal calendar that runs from August-May. I hope you have all enjoyed this season as much as I have. We go again in August.

COYG

Earlier in the winter when Mikel was asked if Arsenal could sustain their excellence towards an originally unpredicted attempt at winning the league, Arenal manager had surmised that we would need to be perfect until the end of the season in every aspect to sustain such an ambition. One suspects he knew what he was talking about, especially given his past proximity to the title-winning machine – I am intentionally keeping aside the discussions about the ethical/legal dimensions of how that machine was built, for the Arsenal manager and the squad can have no control over the arc of that development – that was at that time chasing us, a few points behind and with a couple of games in hand. 

The prescience in that observation has lately been demonstrated as Mikel’s young squad – especially after losing a few of their key personnel to injuries – had started to falter at the final weeks of an exhilarating campaign, whereas the machine kept up its inexhaustible march. 

Arsenal traveled up to the land of Robin Hood (and Friar Tuck) with the hopes of a final twist in this league season’s tale, a twist that was to be no less legendary in proportion than one of Robin’s escapes. While the silk-and-steel dominance over high flying Newcastle had rekindled such a hope just a couple of weeks back, last Sunday’s capitulation at home against a clever and spirited Brighton side highlighted the difficulties of sustaining that level of excellence in the closing days of the campaign. 

Saliba’s back injury has turned out to be season-ending and his absence has proven to generate a negative domino effect along the spine of the side, earlier forcing Partey to take up more responsibilities and covering more space in the middle which most likely had contributed to his mistakes, and subsequent loss of form. Whereas Jorginho has played very well indeed in place of Thomas, he doesn’t quite provide the incision and verticality of the Ghanaian and we had started to look more labored in transition. Then came the loss of Zinchenko and only in his absence came we to appreciate truly why Mikel persisted with him even when the odd defensive mistakes started to pile up, sometimes even leading to conceding goals: a tight technical control of the midfield, variety of passing, and clever manipulation of spaces. Whereas Tierney is a wonderful left back, the Arsenal team this season had become used to relying on the creative unpredictability that the Zinchenko — Xhaka – Martinelli axis of controlled chaos brings. Gabi too has now been sidelined for the rest of the season after being hacked down in the Brighton match. 

Credit to Mikel to try to solve this problem with tactical innovation by deciding to play Partey in a kind of “right flank Zinchenko” role, weighing the loss of Saka-White understanding on the right flank against the potential gain in midfield control by playing Partey-Jorginho-Xhaka together.    

Ramsdale

White – Kiwior — Gabriel

Partey – Ødegaard –Jorginho — Xhaka

Saka – Jesus – Trossard

The bench didn’t include Reiss-Nelson due to illness, but in addition to the usual suspects had three academy players: Walters (who is indeed not an entirely unfamiliar sight anymore), Bandeira and the highly promising Cozier-Duberry. 

We were playing against a team that for a long time this season seemed to be headed straight back to the championship, despite (or maybe even because of) amassing a significant number of experienced and quality players, albeit some of them past their primes. However, a recent run of good performances and results especially at their City Ground home had brought them to a stage where they just needed one more win to stay up, and as the match started it was evident that they were determined to make the home advantage count and ensure their survival without having to stay in the fight through the final day madness. 

In contrast, Arsenal looked labored on the ball and surprisingly bereft of confidence in their movements and passing. Possibly that was due to the change in shape, or the pressure of knowing that a win was absolutely necessary if we were to retain any hope of winning the title, or loss of confidence because of last weekend’s result, or tiredness of body and mind that had now started to take over as the adrenaline of hope rapidly recedes, or maybe a combination of all of these.

The Nottingham Forest players were faster to react to fifty-fifty balls, and more alert on transitions, especially the pair of Gibbs-White and Awoniyi who combined to score their goal at the nineteenth minute, the former interrupting an uncharacteristically lazy cross-field pass from Ødegaard to release the latter on the outside of Gabriel, and even though our Brazilian defender used his pace to cover the ground well and put in a well-timed tackle, the ball bounced against the Nigerian’s shin and bobbled up and past an onrushing Ramsdale. There may have been an element of fortuitousness in the manner of the goal, but it was a well-deserved one from Forest who had started well and by then had sensed a tentativeness in Arsenal’s approach that they were ready to exploit. 

Nottingham Forest 1 ( Awoniyi 19’) – Arsenal 0

Arsenal was dominating possession, but much of that dominance was wasted in possession without purpose or penetration, moving the ball around in the now dreaded horseshoe shape which had at times still crept into our game. We missed Martinelli’s directness, White’s overlapping runs (Partey refusing or unable to combine with Saka in that role), Zinchenko’s movements and passing, and it seemed we would need a moment or two of individual brilliance to bring us back into the match. 

Though Saka, Jesús, Trossard and Ødegaard all tried their very best – and there were a few times when some of the passing around the penalty box did resemble the best of Arsenal this season – there was a degree of turgidity and sloppiness on the ball that stopped us from building any sustained goalmouth pressure.  Even then we should have earned a penalty as Jesus – trying to latch on to a well-placed long pass from the deep – was hauled down in the penalty box when he was the closest to the ball and was going to find himself in a goalscoring position. I would like to say that it remained a mystery why VAR didn’t take a closer look. But we all know that ineptitude, when demonstrated repeatedly, loses its ability to surprise. Power often resides on the barrel of low expectations. 

The first half ended without much of a hope for Arsenal. It was felt that Mikel may want to switch the formation/personnel to bring back a modicum of fluency to our play. The beginning of the second half showed that unless he did so the match was likely to slip away. Around the 63^rd minute he made his first substitutions: bringing in Tierney for Kiwior and Nketiah for Xhaka. In Tierney we finally had someone willing to combine with his forward on the outside and stretch their defense away from the congested central areas. His wing-play inspired a few decent crosses from others as well, though Keylor Navas (Joel Campbell’s Costa Rican teammate, a pointless bit of Arsenal trivia) was dominant enough in the air to handle all those assuredly. Saka tried his best, and maybe a few years from now when he is at his absolute peak he will be able to manufacture a moment of pure individual magic in a match like this to haul us back into contention when we are playing this poorly, but even his best efforts didn’t create enough to swing back the momentum. He did bring out a good save from Navas, and Jorginho had an attempt from a corner that was deflected over. Martin – so often the orchestrator extraordinaire, demonstrating abilities, desire and intelligence – and Trossard both were disappointingly well below their best, and the well-known limitation in Jesús’s otherwise well-rounded game, the inconsistency in his ability to create scoring chances for himself even when things are not going well, did not help. 

We earned a flurry of corners that we didn’t create much from, and the only other substitution made by Mikel – Vieira for Trossard – failed to influence the game. Fabio is a wonderful talent on the ball, but the questions remain if he can really handle the pace and physicality of this league. We Arsenal fans have had seen fair share of diminutive young playmakers with supreme abilities on the ball, and even though you would choose none of them to defend you in a fistfight, on the football pitch they were not at all easy to push off the ball the way Vieira is. I am sure Mikel’s coaching staff have a special plan for him in pre-season. 

As the game ended in the loss that ended our title challenge – and the Forest fans and player erupted in joy at their own survival in the top flight – and much of the football media started to masticate on regurgitated cliches, I myself have nothing but love, pride and admiration for this team. Not many people are mentioning the immensity of their achievement, the fact that we are likely to end up with a points total that is bettered only by one other team in Arsenal’s glorious history, a points total that in an era of a more level-playing field of financially un-doped teams would have been more than adequate to win the league, that while the pre-season predictions had us mostly outside the CL positions we had secured Champions League football with weeks to spare, that we had played some of the most scintillating, innovative, enterprising football the league has ever seen, and put on more remarkable comeback performances in one season than most clubs would need a few decades to combine. All with the youngest team in the league, and the youngest (or second youngest) manager in his first managerial job.

Thank you Arsenal! Looking forward to an old-fashioned final day thumping of Wolves, and the continued upward curve in the seasons to come. 

Arsenal stumbled to a depressing and deserved defeat against a classy and very streetwise Brighton side who scored two avoidable (very avoidable) second half goals embellished by a late breakaway goal by Estupinan to earn a victory which delighted the ghastly Gary Neville. His enjoyment of Arsenal’s demise was tangible.

I have had a very strange, not to say unpleasant, last few weeks and my belief in our ability to win the title evaporated completely when we were outclassed at the Emptihad. So, the last few games have been played (for me) in a strange atmosphere where results, while ostensibly important, have been irrelevant. We’ve been certain of finishing second for a long while, but anything more exciting is out of reach. We’ve still produced encouraging moments leavened with some inexplicable ones (3-3 against Southampton).

Our game with Brighton followed Citeh’s comfortable win at Goodison and my sense from my sofa was that the atmosphere in the stadium had been killed a bit by events in Liverpool. If we had a chance, today was it and if Citeh had dropped points the Grove would have been rocking. 

Instead the game began in a soporific atmosphere. We had left out Zinchenko and retained Jorginho and within a few minutes had to replace Martinelli. The whinging Manchester turd, Gary Neville (backed up later by Roy Keane) saw much more offence in a mid-air challenge from Martinelli on Mitoma which Caicedo took umbrage to, than I did. Caicedo chopped down Martinelli a few minutes later and he was eventually replaced after 23 minutes by Trossard coming in to face his old club.

Brighton are a very capable side who dominate possession and were the more assertive side in the first half. They play possession football at speed and here we saw Mitoma skin White regularly while Caicedo provided the strength and thrust that would have been very useful to us and may be next season. Today we had a whole cluster of players who had shockers. Xhaka was pedestrian in midfield, White had no clue how to deal with Mitoma, nobody in midfield had the zip or quality to contend with Brighton. Trossard had a poor substitute appearance and Jesús lacked the physicality to take on the Brighton defence.

I will avoid reciting the litany of chances for both sides. Brighton dominated first half possession but created fewer chances although Enciso missed a great opportunity after Mitoma skinned White. Ødegaard drilled wide, Trossard had a shot deflected onto the bar and Steele saved from Jesús at the near post. The big difference between the sides was confidence. Brighton were assertive and positive; Arsenal, with Ødegaard subdued, had less rhythm and Saka who has worked incredibly hard this year seems to have lost his spark.

Arsenal’s best period was added time in the first half where they developed some momentum and saw Ødegaard and Saka go close. The referee Andy Madley confirmed the regular impression that he gives me that he is out of his depth in dealing with Premier League players. He misinterpreted several situations, and should certainly have booked Caicedo. Brighton were very quick to foul tactically (especially Enciso) but they probably felt the more comfortable of the two teams at half-time. 

Half-time Arsenal 0 Brighton 0

Arsenal began the second half quickly but soon lapsed back into the pedestrian and cautious approach we saw today. This was a cue for Brighton to dominate. They took the lead on 50 minutes when Enciso headed home from a central position with Kiwior seemingly injured after sustained pressure in the air from the Seagulls.

Arsenal 0 Brighton 1 (50 minutes ) 

Arsenal’s response was much more subdued than usual and involved a string of substitutions. Partey, Nelson, Nketiah and Smith Rowe replaced Xhaka, Jorginho, Ødegaard and Jesús. The reluctance to harness the drive that Smith Rowe gives us was hard to understand and he entered the game at a desperate stage. What are the plans for him? 

We started to take greater passing gambles and a weak flick from Trossard who had moved into midfield rebounded to Undav who lobbed Ramsdale on 85 minutes. 

Arsenal 0 Brighton 2 (85 minutes)

Neville was almost priapic as Brighton exploited the space Arsenal were leaving and may well have achieved orgasm in added time when Ramsdale pushed out a long-distance shot to Estupinan who joyfully netted. 

Arsenal 0 Brighton 3 (90 + 3 minutes) 

Arsenal’s effort did not drop and a couple of shouts for penalties (highly optimistic) went rightly unheeded by the hapless Madley. Sky seemed to want to turn the moment into a realisation that Citeh had won the title although in reality that happened weeks ago at the Etihad.

Final score – Arsenal 0 Brighton 3 

3-0 home defeats are thankfully rare and when they happen create huge concern. It is easy to overreact after a wonderful season where we have exceeded our expectations massively. But this was a poor performance. The team seemed to lack energy, direction and personality. Partey was a bit part(ey) player today but seems to have radically lost his mojo. Xhaka was totally ineffective and the side generally lacked mobility and incisiveness. I suspect the anti-climactic atmosphere had something to do with this and this Arsenal team is still, lest we forget, a work in progress. Let’s view this result with that perspective and hope that the key deficiencies today are ones that Arteta can remedy. Certainly, despite a wonderful season there is always more to do. 

Let’s enjoy our last two matches and regard today as a blip, hopefully one from which we can learn. As for Brighton, they clearly have an extraordinary scouting system, a clear if pragmatic, tactical approach which produces exciting football and several players I’d like to see in red and white next season. I desperately hope we do not get the negative critics piling in having had to wait patiently for months to round on Arteta. Premier League football is demanding and I think we can excuse one shocker. But a good end to the season is very much required after this.