It looked, ahead of a trip to the San Siro to face an in-form AC Milan, as though the Gunners might have been facing a fifth straight defeat at the hands of the Italians. In the end, an impressive 2-0 victory left Arsenal fans unsure whether the appropriate emotional response was to laugh or to cry.
That could well have been a temporary reprieve from the gallows feel around the club, however. And this weekend, Watford could plunge the Gunners to another level of despair with a victory. It would be apt, as Watford are often the club just around the corner when crisis darkens Arsenal’s door.
Earlier in the season when Arsene Wenger’s side lost to Watford at Vicarage Road that things started to look fairly bleak, that wasn’t helped by Troy Deeney’s possibly disrespectful but certainly accurate comments about the Emirates outfit’s lack of ‘cojones’. It rang true: not just because we all knew that this was a side lacking in leaders, but because we’d all witnessed a spineless performance.
However disrespectful it may be to have the opposing captain question his vanquished opponents’ lack of fight on live TV just minutes after the game, it’s hard to disagree when the next segment on BT Sport is an analysis of a goal which features Granit Xhaka picking his nose instead of marking his man. The pictures speak louder than the words anyhow.
That’s not the only Watford capitulation which has angered Arsenal fans over the last couple of seasons.
Last season, with the Gunners in second place and the main rivals to leaders Chelsea, it was a 2-1 defeat at the Emirates Stadium which effectively ended whatever slim title hopes remained. After that, Arsenal didn’t just fail to challenge for the title, but they failed to make the top four, too.
Then the season before that, it was the FA Cup where Arsenal fell to Watford, and a special Adlene Guedioura strike at the Emirates once again. T
hey might have won the FA Cup twice in a row in the two years leading up to that game, but the chance of three in a row was ended abruptly before the semi-final stage, in the middle of another end of season capitulation which saw the Gunners end the season in second place, but 10 points behind league winners Leicester City. That, in itself, perhaps shows that it could well have been Arsenal’s year: not to take away from the Leicester fairytale, but a better Arsenal would have overcome the Foxes in the end.
That’s not the kicker, though. Back in 1986, Arsenal sacked manager Don Howe prior to facing Watford twice in two days. The managerless Gunners conspired to lose both games to the Vicarage Road club. Perhaps that puts the current crisis into perspective, and although defeat on Sunday probably won’t leave Arsenal without a manager, it’s as well for Wenger that wishing alone won’t make it so.
The next year, 1987, Arsenal were dumped out of the FA Cup once again by Watford, and although there was no repeat defeat the next day, there was one the next week – as two defeats in a week the the Hornets were suffered in two consecutive years.
Whatever problems the hapless Gunners have suffered this season, and however far they’ve fallen from Wenger’s glory days, this is still a very different club to the one which stagnated for most of the 1980s before George Graham changed things by the end of the decade.
But no matter how far Arsenal are from that side, it’s still Watford who are proving to be the club the Gunners lose to in a crisis. Will that hold true again this weekend?
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