Daunting questions facing Arsenal ahead of all important clash against Manchester City

Such scenes were even more vivid on the pitch. Aaron Ramsdale putting his fist in his mouth and chewing his fingers, later apologising to the crowd as he walked off. Gabriel Jesus throwing himself in the box and screaming for penalties instead of staying on his feet and just finishing a damn chance.

Oleksandr Zinchenko giving the ball away, Martin Odegaard miscuing a header, Thomas Partey ballooning a stupid Hail Mary shot a couple of miles over the bar. “This is what letting a title slip away looks like,” Gary Neville said.

Friday’s chaotic, melodramatic, traumatic draw with Southampton left you with two questions about Arsenal. How on earth do they recover from the blows they’re suddenly taking to get their title challenge back on track? And how do they recover, longer term, if these are the circumstances of how this season’s opportunity slips away?

The first question demands an answer from Mikel Arteta and his players on Wednesday at the Etihad. Evolving further under Pep Guardiola, with their defensive line of four footballing centre backs and Erling Haaland at the top of the pitch, Manchester City have become a side who can shut you out and destroy you on the break, as Bayern Munich discovered, and it is against that unit that Arsenal have to somehow make the game open without leaving themselves too open, to produce a victory at a stadium where they haven’t won in eight years.

The common narrative is that Arsenal are “bottling” this league but almost the reverse seems true. Arteta and his team don’t lack bravery or assertiveness – their absence is of the internal mechanisms needed to channel these things. They’re not “bottling it” but letting too much out of the bottle. Too much emotion, too much hurry, too much risk.

These past few weeks have been one big lesson in the value of maturity and experience. Brilliantly as they have done, Arsenal are showing they are the youngest team in the Premier League, while we are reminded that no manager has ever won the title as young as Arteta (41) or as soon (3 and a half years) after becoming a head coach.

The warning signs were there in a 4-2 victory away to Aston Villa in February, where Arsenal came back from going behind twice and scored in the 93rd and 98th minutes to earn a result which sparked such passions that members of both sets of coaching staff had to be separated after squaring up to each other in the press box. I came home from that one exhilarated but with the thought that Arsenal were going to need a little less drama if they were going to win the league, that what they could do with were some drab 1-0s.

It’s how Leicester City took the sting out of all the hullabaloo in 2015-16. Two points ahead with 12 games to go and with a fortnight’s break, Claudio Ranieri sent his players on holiday and they came back to go 1-0, 2-2, 1-0, 1-0, 1-0, 1-0, 2-0. They won the league by ten points.

When Peter Schmeichel looked back on his five titles with Manchester United for his autobiography, the game he kept coming back to was a 1-0 victory away to Charlton Athletic in January 1999. It was a Sunday 4pm kick-off in the cold, where he played with a dislocated finger on a muddy pitch, and Dwight Yorke headed home in the last minute. Schmeichel wrote that it is in those games “that titles are won”. Arsenal, two weeks after the Villa escape, got away with beating Bournemouth via a 97th-minute winner after going 2-0 down.

The second question, what the long-term consequences of falling short this season may be, brings to mind different touchpoints. United’s title spree started the season after they led the league for most of the campaign but blew up in the run-in to hand the 1991-92 First Division championship to Leeds United. What rebuilt United was Alex Ferguson’s iron belief in his men. “You’ll use this season to become winners next season,” he told them. You could see something similar in Arteta when, in his post-match interview on Friday, almost the first thing he said was that he loved his players more than ever.

Arsenal could also draw on their own history, blowing an eight-point lead in 2002-03 to roar back with the Invincibles season of 2003-04, but an alternative touchstone is Liverpool in 2013-14. Like Arteta’s side, they were young, flamboyant and fearless, but unable to grind near the victory line. I remember saying to Jamie Carragher just before they were overhauled by City that even if Liverpool didn’t win the title, the experience would stand them in good stead, and there was so much promise in Brendan Rodgers and his squad that they would be likely to claim the crown in future seasons. “It doesn’t work like that,” Carragher said. He drew on a hard-bitten pro’s experience to explain that when opportunities arise you have to take them, because there are never any guarantees they’ll come along again. A year later, Rodgers was losing 6-1 at Stoke City and on his way to the sack.

For Arsenal, the reality is that City could be even better next season. They could sign Jude Bellingham, finally acquire a world-class left back, and Erling Haaland will have even more nous. Manchester United could get taken over by Qatar and spend a squillion on top of the improvements that Erik ten Hag has already made. Liverpool should be significantly better, while Newcastle United’s development should continue.

So, if this is to be their collapse, Arsenal can only respond with even more of what got them to this point: more superb recruitment, more brilliant coaching, more growth from talents like Odegaard, Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and William Saliba, whose absence has been so sorely felt. Had Saliba played against Southampton, would Arsenal not have had more security building from the back and avoided that Ramsdale error? Would they have defended against pace better, and thus avoided Theo Walcott’s goal?

Ifs and buts. To avoid being left with a bundle of those, Arsenal have to go and win at the Etihad. Easy, eh? They have got some of the tools. But do they have the control to use them?

Originally published as Daunting questions facing Arsenal ahead of all important clash against Manchester City