Premier League Hangover: As Per, Arsenal Left Counting the Costa

In 1964, Saul Bellow published a novel. In a rare feat for a writer, it made him both rich and famous, with its eponymous anti-hero in a period of intense self-reflection telling himself, "I am Herzog, I have to be that man."

Herzog is neither especially likeable nor particularly principled, but in a moment of crisis, when burdened by multiple failures, he takes control by becoming the best version of himself he can be, unapologetically warts and all.

Diego Costa would never concede to having endured a crisis of confidence during the death throes of Jose Mourinho’s tenure at Chelsea, even when a lean period in front of goal saw him net just four times in 24 matches. Yet, at the same time, after condemning Arsenal to defeat on Sunday with a performance in equal parts malevolent, mischievous and magnificent, it's easy to imagine him in times of doubt looking into a mirror and winking at his reflection: "I am Diego Costa, I have to be that man." 

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Arsenal hate that man, but that man has twice in as many matches between the two clubs held up a mirror to their frailties. 

The problem with Arsenal is that when they look in the mirror, they like what is reflected. Too much.

While other clubs notice only the imperfections, ageing lines that scream knackered as opposed to experience, Arsenal congratulate themselves on an exemplary moisturising regime.

There’s plenty to admire, and it’s easy to see why Arsene Wenger feels he has the prettiest wife at home. Pretty doesn’t always produce prizes, though. Wenger, more than anyone, should know that. 

When the dust settles on a defeat that extends Arsenal's winless run against Chelsea in the Premier League to nine matches (they have failed to score in the last six to boot), and the indignation over Costa’s theatrics that masks wider frustration subsides, what will be left are failings so familiar to the home side it's a wonder Sunday’s game wasn't scripted by the club’s biographer. 

If this was an early audition for the role of Premier League champions, Arsenal shouldn't expect a callback. Four wins and a draw from five matches against the Manchester clubs in 2015 had meant Chelsea were the last hoodoo still to be exorcised. This was a game in which Wenger and his players were supposed to send out a message to the rest of the division.

They did: "We're just as fallible as you are." 

Wenger couldn't even blame Mourinho for this defeat; though, it's not out of the question that he will have found a reason to do so by the next time he addresses the media.

Having taken two points from a possible nine, Arsenal drop to third on a weekend in which Tottenham Hotspur edged to within a couple of points of their north London cohorts. Chelsea's only other away wins this season have come at West Bromwich Albion, Walsall, Maccabi Tel Aviv and Crystal Palace.

Engaging early sparring, in which Chelsea pressed high as Arsenal were hounded into some unnecessary errors, hinted that the visitors were looking beyond merely maintaining a six-match unbeaten run.

They may be significantly closer to the relegation zone than the Champions League places, but even in fallow times one would have assumed impossible in the Roman Abramovich years, it's fanciful to suggest Chelsea's mindset hasn't always been about whom they can catch, as opposed to who can catch them.

One thing is for certain, Per Mertesacker couldn't catch Costa. How Arsenal must now rue rejecting his request for a mobility scooter over the summer. 

Just 18 minutes had elapsed when Willian's impressive surging run from deep was matched by a perfectly weighted through ball for his team-mate. Mertesacker bounded over with all the subtlety and control of a giraffe being pushed down a hill in a barrel.

Costa's touch took him beyond the flat-footed German, who by this point had overcommitted with the naivety of a lonely university fresher agreeing to go on holiday with the first person willing to speak to them in the student union bar. Mertesacker's lunge made minimal contact, but not before he had lost a split second by somewhat bizarrely looking across himself to see if an offside had been flagged. It hadn't.

On impact, Costa completed more rolls than someone on a week's trial at a Subway restaurant.  

In his post-match interview with Sky Sports, Wenger accused Costa of getting Mertesacker sent off. However, given the incident left his side down to 10 men for over 70 minutes, in a match that could have weighty significance in the title race, the Frenchman's response seemed too measured to have been born from a seething sense of injustice.  

Wenger's ire instead appeared to be more accumulative, with his disdain for Costa stretching back to September, when during Chelsea's 2-0 win over Arsenal at Stamford Bridge, the Spain international tormented Gabriel Paulista to the point it looked as though the Premier League may be witness to its first murder.

"And it's Live!" Sky Sports' Martin Tyler would have boomed, while Arsenal's sheepish centre-half was led away by London Metropolitan Police. 

In the end, Gabriel got a red card instead, and it was the Brazilian who was summoned to fill the hole vacated by Mertesacker.

Olivier Giroud was hooked after Theo Walcott refused to come off because it was his 10th birthday or something. The Frenchman was not happy and went into full-on Zoolander mode as he dragged his heels, before spending the second half pouting at Mertesacker with the pair made to wear club ties like two school kids being made an example of having been caught smoking.

The decision to replace Giroud was met with bemusement by many of the Emirates faithful. Sacrificing his side's attacking focal point and the player best suited to hold the ball up seemed a tad maverick, but Wenger gave those querying his tactics short shrift at full-time.

"Do you want me to make a poll for every decision?" he sarcastically asked reporters, per the Metro.

Whether it was Giroud who boomed "Oui!" from the other side of the wall is unconfirmed. 

With Gabriel still deciding whether to mark Costa or complete the job he failed to finish in September, Arsenal's back four soon lost both its shape and a goal. Nacho Monreal failed to get out to Branislav Ivanovic with anything like enough urgency down Chelsea's right, and from the Serbian's devilish low cross, Costa cut across his (nonexistent) markers to dart for the near post and finish with the aplomb of a player who has scored six in as many matches since Guus Hiddink replaced Mourinho.

Infamy tends to magnify follies, and while it's easy to fall into the trap of righteousness on the topic of Costa, there was much to admire about his afternoon's work beyond a winning goal.

A predilection to pretend not to have heard referee Mark Clattenburg's whistle each time he was flagged offside was childish to the point it bordered on performance art, but it was hugely entertaining all the same. Boring stuff like his hold-up play and willingness to plough the loneliest of furrows was largely impeccable, too.

In his 68 minutes before he was replaced by Loic Remy, whose own cameo was conversely atrocious, Costa managed to be at once good, bad and ugly. That's when he's arguably at his best. The rousing ovation he received from the away fans upon leaving the field to an Ennio Morricone score completed his metamorphosis from rat to golden calf in little over a month.

Cesc Fabregas was another singled out by Chelsea fans for failing to put in a shift when Mourinho needed it most. On Sunday, he was magnificent. Like Costa, a seismic shift in his form has coincided with Hiddink's arrival.

The needle Fabregas received from the Arsenal fans who forgave him Barcelona but were never likely to do likewise with Chelsea, seemingly emboldened him to hit a new level in a season that ranks as the worst of his career to date. 

Whereas at times under Mourinho he meandered with the quietly alarmed look of a young boy telling himself he is not lost in a supermarket, here, he was the store manager. Telling his team-mates where they should be before finding them with a succession of cute passes, he played the game as Garry Kasparov does chess: forever two steps ahead of everyone else on the board.

Happy to play a quarterback role in dropping deep to take the ball off his centre-backs in the knowledge Arsenal would not be willing to press high, while simultaneously having rediscovered a taste for running at opponents, Fabregas' was a performance that will have left the home supporters heaving heavy hearts back to their cars at full-time. 

Fabregas topped the charts in terms of touches, passes made and tackles won. 

Had Clattenburg not been distracted by his own performance, which had enough pronounced flourishes to suggest it's a matter of when not if he becomes a staple on the reality TV circuit, he might have spotted Laurent Koscielny crashing into his former team-mate for what should have been the most blatant of penalties.

Wenger was unstinting in the praise he showered on his players for the manner in which they rallied with 10 men, particularly in a second period in which they dominated for spells. He's looking in the mirror and giving himself too much credit, again. Title winners win games—or at least save games—when decisions go against them.

Arsenal didn't even look close to doing so on Sunday.

It wasn't until the 87th minute when they fostered their first shot on target. Arsenal played some pretty football, but Chelsea never looked punch drunk, never reached for the smelling salts and never once felt the cold slap of the canvas. 

Arsenal hit their peak in the fifth minute of added time. With the team lacking an aerial presence in the absence of Giroud and Mertesacker, Petr Cech was summoned from his goal to attack a set piece.

The corner failed to beat the first man. As a microcosm of the day, it seemed strangely apt.

Will Louis van Gaal make it to the end of the season at Old Trafford?

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"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." —Albert Einstein (among others).

Ground up and used as a tranquilizer, most Manchester United performances this season could render a horse unconscious. 

Louis van Gaal has been a mainstay of this column all campaign, chiefly because watching his side feels like being administered with a hangover but without the fun bit that usually precedes the horror. Like a Dutch Nurse Ratched, he doles out possession as she did pills on the grounds it’s good for you, but in the full knowledge that fans/patients/inmates will be dead behind the eyes before full-time.

By the time Southampton substitute Charlie Austin had marked his debut with a winner courtesy of just his second touch three minutes from time, the home crowd’s enthusiasm had been stymied to the point barely a murmur could be mustered when the board showed there would be five minutes of added time.

It can only be a matter of time before it flashes up with existential messages: "HELP," "WHY?," "ALIENATION," "NOTHINGNESS."

From the Theatre of Dreams to the Mausoleum of Memories, Old Trafford under the Dutchman is fast becoming a mawkish tourist attraction to rival Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Just as the resting place of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf et al attracts the melancholic for a quiet lament of greatness lost, a trip to the home of Manchester United provides a 90-minute sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of goals and entertainment.

In almost total silence, it’s possible to wile away a whole afternoon daydreaming idly of Matt Busby and George Best, Bobby Charlton and Eric Cantona, and Alex Ferguson and Marouane Fellaini.

The sound of more than 70,000 pairs of hands not clapping, a current incarnation so anemic it’s a wonder Ed Woodward hasn’t brokered a sponsorship deal with Guinness, is usually so peaceful Van Gaal can’t help but have been jolted by the jeers as he walked down the touchline after Saturday’s defeat to Southampton.

Ranking United performances this season in terms of dreariness is like asking an Alaskan not in possession of a coat to list their colds in order of runniness. Nonetheless, a game in which a first-half Daley Blind speculative 30-yard effort—which Southampton's Fraser Forster saved comfortably—was their only shot on target, feels like a tipping point. 

Here's a look at the last 11 half-time scores at Old Trafford:

• 0-0 Southampton, Premier League
  
• 0-0 Sheffield United, FA Cup
  
• 0-0 Swansea City, Premier League
  
• 0-0 Chelsea, Premier League
  
• 0-1 Norwich City, Premier League 
  
• 0-0 West Ham, Premier League
  
• 0-0 PSV Eindhoven, Champions League
  
• 0-0 West Brom, Premier League
  
• 0-0 CSKA Moscow, Champions League
  
• 0-0 Middlesbrough, League Cup
  
• 0-0 Manchester City, Premier League

To reach half-time without scoring for an 11th home game running is remarkable. Even more remarkable is Opta's post-match stat that confirms none of the other 91 Premier League and Football League clubs have had fewer shots on target at home than Manchester United all season.

Monday's newspapers are universally rammed with reports of an impending departure:

After the match, Van Gaal said, as noted by Jamie Jackson of the Guardian:

"

You cannot say that they [fans] are not right.

They are right and of course they are disappointed and they have the right to boo me. You know it was not good today. It was a poor game and we could not create chances and our opponent also had a few chances. So it’s more or less a 0-0 game. But at the end we have lost.

"

With Mourinho having allegedly, according to the Independent, gone a bit Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the pressure surely now is only going to intensify on Van Gaal.

According to reports, Mourinho has spent every day since leaving Chelsea sitting at a typewriter composing a 6,000-page manuscript addressed to Woodward that is made up entirely of the phrase "All play and no work makes Jose a dull boy."

That might not be a problem for too much longer, Jose.

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