Arsenal Fans Should Be Optimistic, but They've Failed from This Position Before

“It’s not me, me, me, it’s one-two-three.” Arsene Wenger’s almost musical summary of his football philosophy—one with which we are all now more than familiar—at the end of Arsenal’s 3-0 demolition of Chelsea was pleasingly rhythmic, just like the perfectly cadenced job his team had just done on their bewildered rivals.

The crux is that it’s not all about one player in his Arsenal teams; it never has been, not even when Thierry Henry was shredding teams at will with the Invincibles. Wenger’s dream has always been to rip opponents up not with one player but with 11. 

“That is based on pressure on the opponent, playing with connections, with pace. That is what football is about. It's not about one player," the Frenchman added, per Jack Pitt-Brooke of The Independent.

That’s the metrical perfection which Arsenal can drum up on their day, that ruthless, ceaseless beat; one-two-three.

After the win over Chelsea, the metronome seems to be set for a sustained run, not just in terms of results but perhaps even regarding that electric verve that once saw Arsenal celebrated as one of the world’s best.

For much of the early evening on Saturday, they looked to have rediscovered that swagger. But if Arsenal’s football obeyed a strict set of rhythms, then it also evoked a similarly predictable narrative.

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Throughout the long 12-year stretch that has seen the club finish second in the Premier League only once and no higher, there have been more than a few new dawns that have stubbornly failed to break, and new eras which have never quite dawned.

When a club’s fortunes slip into recession, it’s natural for fans and sympathetic parties to see, in the smallest chinks of sunlight, the potential for a great heatwave to rage.

Arsenal have been here before, and while the emphatic nature of the win over Chelsea will rightly ignite fresh flames of optimism beneath the Emirates Stadium, there are warnings still to be heeded if this is to prove anything other than a pleasing memory before a familiar midseason implosion.

The Chelsea game marked just shy of a year since Wenger’s team blew Manchester United away in a similarly explosive first-half display of direct movement and ruthless finishing.

On that day last October, the Gunners led United 3-0 after 19 blistering minutes at the Emirates and saw out the win comfortably, despite—as on Saturday—missing enough chances later in the game to turn a statement victory into pure humiliation. It came early in a run of eight wins in 12 games which took Arsenal to within a point of the top at Christmas. Then, familiar sinkholes opened up.

Arsenal lost 4-0 at Southampton on Boxing Day, days after Gunners' podcast, The Tuesday Club, had confidently proclaimed: “This isn’t a side that is going to get beaten 6-0 by anyone anymore.”

They were correct, mathematically, but defeat against Saints had come at a poignant moment. Victory over United, plus a solid 2-1 win over Manchester City at the Emirates on December 21, had injected a confidence among Gunners fans that things had changed.

That confidence had spread to the dressing room, too. Goalscorer Theo Walcott confidently told Sky Sports News (h/t SportsMole) after the game against United that "this could be our year" in a rare glimpse of hubris from what is normally a tight-lipped Arsenal camp under Wenger.

It seemed a strange kind of admission, out of keeping with the level-headed, measured control that Wenger usually holds over his players; and it came back to haunt the club as whimpering defeats against Chelsea and United in the following months contributed to another title collapse.

In the end, the emphatic nature of victory over Louis van Gaal’s inflexible United side probably did more harm than good, creating a sense of optimism and artificial security that owed as much to an insipid performance from the visitors as to anything else.

Wenger seemed to recognise this. He suggested, probably correctly, that United hadn’t been ready for the speed with which his team started the game, and used his media duties to play down the idea that the win was anything other than a decent showing amid a work in progress.

"We had only superb performances today...[but] I have managed many strong teams and never had one that played 60 games at the same level," he said after the game, per BBC Sport. "You have to accept that we are human beings."

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Against City in December, the victory was in some ways more emphatic, not in terms of the 2-1 scoreline but in the way Arsenal manipulated their opponents and controlled what was a tight, balanced match to the end.

They invited Manuel Pellegrini's side on for the opening half-hour, absorbing the pressure applied by the Premier League’s most expensive squad and clogging all that lovely space in between the lines that the likes of City have exploited to so ruthlessly in dispatching Arsenal in the past, before hitting them hard and fast on the break.

This was a truer triumph for Wenger tactically than against United, but again it proved only temporary. His team were thrashed by Southampton in their next outing and finished 10 points off the pace in May.

If the Chelsea win turns out to be just as fleeting a moment of relief in the club’s long narrative of near-misses, then the sumptuous pass-and-move play that had the Emirates purring on Saturday will quickly slip down among the footnotes of the 2016/17 season.

Instead, history will remember this as another year when schoolboy errors and psychological lapses undermined a squad that, on paper only, looks fit to challenge for the title.

Chelsea offered insufficient threat up front and steel at the back to really question whether or not Arsenal have become more reliable when their backs are to the wall. Antonio Conte’s team were prosaic and slow on the ball, and suicidal off it.

The hosts had all the time and space they needed to set their chosen pace and were helped throughout by hapless defending, Alexis Sanchez’s pickpocketing of Gary Cahill for the first goal was just the thick end of a wedge for the Blues, who were shambolic. There will be stiffer tests for Arsenal.

In this sense, the result confirms a lot of what we already knew. This team has come a long way since Jose Mourinho’s side put six past them at Stamford Bridge in Wenger’s 1,000th game in 2014, and indeed since City and Liverpool inflicted 6-3 and 5-1 defeats weeks earlier.

However, we still can’t say that Arsenal have come to a point where they can summon enough backbone to stiffen up a challenge from August to May.

Nobody is going to beat this team 6-0, probably; but if they ship an early goal away to a fired-up Burnley on Sunday, with 11 men behind the ball, the slick one-two breakaway between Mesut Ozil and Sanchez that led to Arsenal’s sublime third goal against Chelsea will offer up little as a blueprint.

That’s the flexibility that the Arsenal of 2016 will need to demonstrate if they’re to build on Saturday’s excellence; slick and expressive wherever possible, strong and uncompromising whenever necessary.

Wenger’s words at the weekend suggest he feels his squad is in a stronger position now than when they overcame United and City last season, quicker to talk up his team’s performance than to temper expectations.

That, at least, should be of encouragement to Gunners fans. It’s up to their team now to keep the beat.