Like the most gripping of courtroom dramas, there were plenty of remarkably varied versions of the truth at the Emirates Stadium. But the expert witness swung the jury. The professorial Arsène Wenger, with 15 years of close-hand experience of Arsenal, declared his team to be predictable, slow and lacking penetration.
Never mind that Robin van Persie was upbeat — “I don’t think we could have done any more, everyone gave 100 per cent,” the Holland striker said — nor that Steve Kean, the Blackburn Rovers manager, believed that he outwitted Arsenal with his pressing game. No, the verdict had to be that, just as Arsenal needed to apply pressure to Manchester United, they buckled.
It was a miserable afternoon to be a Gooner. First United wobbled away to West Ham United only to recover with a hefty dose of steely self-belief, then Wenger’s side wobbled at home against a team who had gone seven games without a win. There was a general sense of despair and one factor had to be that United fightback a few hours earlier, a display of feistiness that screamed “the title is ours”.
If only Arsenal had played at lunchtime. Ah, and now it gets messy. Is it really such a disadvantage to play a few hours after your closest rivals? Wenger thinks so and even hinted at dark forces conspiring to ensure that his team would be at that very disadvantage for the rest of the campaign.
“There’s a lot of things going on that I don’t want to talk about,” Wenger said. “I’ve been here for 15 years and I know how things work, so I want to be completely neutral, like I have to be because I am not involved in any decision. I don’t decide the schedule. You should ask people who make the schedule. If you look, when do we play? We play every game [at the weekend] from now until the end of the season on a Sunday.”
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It would be a conspiracy theory too far to argue that when Arsenal face United on Sunday, May 1, it somehow is of benefit to Sir Alex Ferguson. And, in any case, Arsenal play earlier than United on the next Sunday and, on the final day of the season, all teams play at the same time. Yet Wenger was clearly frustrated at the fixture list after his players crumpled in the face of United’s fine result.
“I was watching the game and it was a bit frustrating to see them [United] 2-0 down and coming back to win 4-2,” Van Persie said. “I would rather see them losing. But it didn’t have an influence on me.”
This is not the first time that the self-belief of Wenger’s young team has been in question, regardless of Van Persie’s equanimity. As Kean pointed out, his players had to handle West Bromwich Albion securing an unexpected three points against Liverpool and that the clubs, such as Blackburn, hoping to stride away from the relegation zone had made some progress to that end.
“I knew the other results but tried to focus on the game plan and we delivered that well,” he said. “If you give them time and space, they can play any pass in the book, so we have been working hard on getting early pressure in the middle third.”
If Blackburn can maintain focus when worried about survival, why can’t Arsenal do the same when dealing with the more glamorous challenge of a title race? “It’s difficult to explain,” Wenger said. “The players did want it but we were just one-paced and that’s not our game.”
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They were not themselves, then, but in some ways, the fragility was so very Arsenal and the stadium reeked of impatience at their foibles.
Arsenal (4-2-3-1): M Almunia 6 — B Sagna 5, S Squillaci 5, L Koscielny 6, G Clichy 5 — A Song 6, J Wilshere 6 — T Walcott 5 (sub: M Chamakh, 73min), S Nasri 7 (sub: N Bendtner, 78), A Arshavin 7 (sub: F Fàbregas, 58 6) — R van Persie 6. Substitutes not used: J Lehmann, E Eboué, T Rosicky, A Diaby. Booked: Song. Next: Blackpool (a).
Blackburn Rovers (4-1-4-1): P Robinson 7 — M Salgado 6, R Nelsen 7, C Samba 7, M Olsson 7 — P Jones 6 — B Emerton 6, S N’Zonzi 6, J Jones 5 (sub: D Dunn, 90), D Hoilett 5 — R Santa Cruz 4 (sub: J Roberts, 62 5). Substitutes not used: M Bunn, R Rochina, Benjani Mwaruwari, G Hanley, M B Diouf. Booked: Salgado, Hoilett. Sent off: N’Zonzi. Next: Birmingham City (h).
Referee: P Dowd. Attendance: 60,087