The pain of the nearly men

Morning.

A quick Friday blog for you as I’m heading to London this morning. The game against Newcastle will be on the agenda when Mikel Arteta meets the press this morning, and I’m curious to see what kind of form he’s in. After his comments following the Liverpool game, I suspect the message will be a bit more positive, but still determined to get a result that would basically seal second place.

On the Arsecast yesterday, I had a chat with Amy Lawrence, and drew some parallels between the current period and the one between 1999 and 2001 when Arsenal finished second on three successive occasions. Each time we were beaten to the title by Man Utd. In 1999, we lost out by a single point – 79 to 78 (imagine 79 being good enough to win the league these days!), but in 2000 and 2001, the gap was 14 and 10 points respectively. Not really fine margins.

The big difference, of course, was that we had the small matter of the 1997-98 double under our belts. Proof that this was a team that could go the distance. Nevertheless, that period was fraught with disappointment too. If you lived through it, you understand how great that rivalry was with United, so even seeing them crowned champions was incredibly painful, in a way that isn’t even close to the same when Man City or even this Liverpool team do it.

I don’t think we have that kind of rivalry with anyone these days, and even when the TV companies tried to tell us City v Liverpool was the greatest head to head the Premier League has ever seen, I don’t think it came close to how febrile and raw Arsenal v United was back then. At the core of it, for me at least, was the fact City as a club felt sterile, fabricated in a financial laboratory, and robotically brilliant on the pitch under the guidance of Pep Guardiola. City were a machine, lacking any kind of heart; while Liverpool felt all heart under Jurgen Klopp.

But with players like Dennis Bergkamp, Tony Adams, Thierry Henry, Freddie Ljungberg, Patrick Vieira etc, we suffered in that three year period. Not just from United being the dominant team in the land, but pain of our own ‘failures’ (a word I use reservedly because every time I do I think of this video). That FA Cup semi-final in 1999, Bergkamp’s penalty, that goal we conceded (someone just hack him down, FFS!); losing a European final on penalties; the FA Cup final in 2001 when Liverpool were allowed play two goalkeepers and we lost to a couple of late goals from the unbearable Michael Owen; losing what we we felt were key players to ‘big’ clubs, even if the likes of Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit didn’t really do that well at Barcelona; not to mention the constant stories about other players being tempted to away to Spain and beyond.

It’s funny, because what followed those three years of pain was a period of sustained success. Another double in 2002, FA Cup in 2003 (although we should have won the league that year too), the Invincibles in 2004 (and we should have won the Champions League that season too). But I think those successes and those trophies have softened our view of those other three years. Arseblog didn’t exist then, so I don’t have the ability to go back in time to see how I felt written down, but I’m sure frustration was abundant.

I remember that UEFA Cup final against Galatasaray and going to watch it in The Baggot Inn in Dublin. I think they had a screening with loads of Arsenal fans. At the end, after the penalties, I recall people being angry and frustrated. One guy was furious with Emmanuel Petit, and it was that summer he and Overmars were sold to Barcelona. But, after I left the pub to get the bus home, that emotion was gone, for the most part left in that pub basement, because there wasn’t really any way for it to linger the way it does today.

All of which is a really long-winded way of saying even the best teams, teams that can win and have won, can go through periods of being ‘nearly men’. The challenge for Mikel Arteta and this current iteration of Arsenal, of course, is that they don’t have the safety-net of success that Arsene Wenger’s team back then, or indeed some of the players had from their time under George Graham. That’s the next step, turning that sense of being so close into something that can get over the line. Which is what this summer is about, I suppose.

For some extra reading this morning, Tim’s column expands on a theme I touched on during the week, and that is the perception of what Arteta says publicly when it’s broadly reported in the media, versus the reality of what he actually says and how he says it. Well worth your time.

Right, I’m gonna leave it there for now. As well as the game against Newcastle on Sunday, we have our live event at Union Chapel on Saturday evening, and we’re looking forward to seeing lots of you there. There are some spare tickets doing the rounds, I’ve made this Patreon post public to help facilitate some ‘ticket exchange’ if you like, so if you missed out and would like to come along, check it out.

For now, I’ll leave you with yesterday’s podcast below, hope to see some of you over the weekend at the event and beyond (do say hi!), and we’ll have a preview podcast on Patreon for you a bit later this afternoon too. Have a good one.