Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard

This Premier League season has been bleak. The quality of play is the worst in over a decade, and as a spectacle it has not been compelling. You have to go back to Antonio Conte’s insufferably dull Chelsea side winning the league at a canter and Leicester City’s miracle campaign in 2014/15 which saw Spurs, yes, that Spurs, finish second, to find worse.

While this and the antics and tactics of their peculiar, pessimistic manager and his infatuation with light bulbs is responsible for cultivating a perception of distaste aimed in their direction, Arsenal fans surely won’t care what the haters say. Having finished league runners-up three years in a row and it being twenty-two years since their last league title, for their fans, desperate ends justify Arsenal’s disgusting means.

Arsenal’s influence on the game concerns me more than being subjected to an unpalatable reality where Mikel Arteta is labelled a league title winning manager and, as a result, becomes more self-righteously smug than ever. Success is subject to imitation, and we’ve already observed that some managers simply aren’t good enough to resist copying aspects of Arsenal’s approach.

Most Premier League sides are now dabbling with an Arteta favourite, and one of football’s biggest eyesores – long throws. Not to mention other ugly tactics of the Tony Pulis school – crowding the goalkeeper at corners and, to help with that, using a back four consisting of all centre backs. Arteta also encourages use of the more established dark arts, namely cheating, such as constantly whining at referees and gaming them by diving at the slightest of touches, at a frequency we’ve not yet witnessed before.

I’ll concede this isn’t a convincing argument, or anything more than a coincidence, but I find it interesting that Arsenal’s cynicism mirrors the attitudes and behaviour of the far right in politics. As Arsenal and Arteta get closer to success, the standard and style of their football decays to a defensive, physical and sceptical morass. By comparison, in response to increased ethnic and religious diversification, would you say that neo-cons and Zionists have become more or less dogmatic, parochial and hostile to minorities, and forms creativeness, ingenuity, expertise and abstractness over the last decade?

Forms of unscrupulousness further corrosiveness in the culture. Case in point – placating the colonial right-wingnuts and their confected civilization war of Judeo-Christianity versus Islam, that taps into Renaud Camus’ great replacement theory, has delivered us a proxy class war that maintains and centralises the power and wealth for the few. This inevitably leaves us demoralized and fatigued with the chemtrails of that process; political corruption, inflation, wage stagnation and widening wealth inequality (hint, they’re all linked) and that fixing it through politics feels seemingly intractable.

Football should offer an escape from the general mundanity and problems of the every-person and concerns about political and geopolitical strife. Indulged by the inverted snobbery of referees and complacent ex-professional pundits, now football is being sullied too and you’re faced with a grim concoction of perpetual diving, playing for territory by blasting the ball into the corner flag at the kick off and central defenders running into the legs of opposition attackers to earn fouls. Playing for corners and for free kicks in the attacking third, a cacophony of blocking and shirt pulling at corners, taking a minute to dry the ball with a towel before a long throw and four-minute VAR checks are now standard in every match. Not forgetting, how fucking could you, the biggest blight on the game – a tangible increase in various forms of time wasting; the goalie re-spotting the ball at a goal kick four times, even at the cost of a yellow card, and feigning injuries.

Elements of this dismal list broadly describes the attritional, territorial, scrappy, brutish, straight line running, elbow pumping quagmire you’d associate with the dross sport that is Rugby Union, not association football. Only the Welsh, Boris Johnson, grouse beaters and tweed wearers enjoy watching such a mess. Folk consume football for all kinds of reasons, and one of them is to witness excellence, sophistication and ambition, especially from a side aiming to be league champions.

Then there’s the sense Arsenal may achieve success by default. Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time. But this iteration of Manchester City isn’t of the level of the treble winning side. Liverpool will hope they’re having a gap season. United and Chelsea keep sacking managers and can’t quite get their act together, and the rest are the rest.

If Arsenal do succeed, I suspect, once the relief of finally getting over the line dissipates, it will be replaced by a hollowness. A retrospective of successes should elicit pride, but will winning a mediocre Premier League in such a cowardly, functional fashion be remembered fondly by Arsenal fans ten years from now?

George Graham’s 1989 title winning side, while boring, and immortalized by the sarcastic “1-0 to the Arsenal” chant, didn’t cheat and therefore their achievement commands respect. No, the bigger problem is a more approximate and exasperating juxtaposition that will inevitably be made between Arteta’s anachronistic and negative approach and Arsene Wenger’s enlightened one. The 2003/04 title winning Arsenal side went unbeaten in the league, featured Pires, Henry, Bergkamp and Vieira, played with flair, guile, speed, scoring the most goals in the division and conceding the fewest. The style, control, ambition and dominance in which it was achieved exposes Mikel Arteta’s inability to embrace those facets, and, most insidious of all, a lack of trust in his own team, assembled at great expense, to produce football of that standard.

This says something about Arteta, that defacing the game with turgid, soporific football, just to win, is who he is, and, I’d suggest, why Arsenal have struggled to win anything over the last six years. Perhaps this is Arteta’s confession, that he’s not of the same calibre as his contemporaries because we have recent proof that winning in such a grisly way is not a necessity for better men. Despite the financial doping of their theocratic state ownership, it took Pep Guardiola’s arrival and insistence on using technique and movement to monopolize possession for Manchester City to finally dominate English football. Liverpool also won the title under Jurgen Klopp, and last season under Arne Slot, by playing aggressively on the front foot. Pre-Brexit we had a throughline of progressive football; Wenger’s Arsenal, Ancelotti’s AC Milan, followed by the Barcelona side of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta, and then Guardiola’s Bayern Munich.

In the here and now, hope remains that Mikel Arteta will not reap the rewards of his meagre ideas. Arsenal just lost the league cup final to Manchester City with a clueless display. There are seven games left in the league, and they could still flub that. The Champions League is full of teams that could see them off; PSG, Bayern, Barcelona, Liverpool and Real Madrid. We’re counting on them to ensure that playing with skill and adventure remains a prerequisite for success at the pinnacle of the sport.

Otherwise, this Mikel Arteta led regressive wave could become more than a blip – a wrong turn at a motorway junction that becomes an unwelcome detour through a series of rundown post-industrial towns, a road to nowhere good.