On 11th February, Arsenal beat Blackburn at home, and I wrote that those 3 points might turn out to be a defining moment in Arsenal's season. That win took us 5 points clear, and if we'd gone on to win the League, that would have been the start of the run. Well, that absolutely isn't going to happen now. Since then, Arsenal have beaten AC Milan over 2 legs, but have failed to win a League game in the last month. Four draws, eight points dropped, and the title challenge now needing Manchester United (and Chelsea) to slip up if we are to get back into it.The game itself was to some degree predictable - we have seen it before at Emirates. Middlesbrough went ahead after about half an hour, Jeremie Aliadiere predictably scoring against us again, after five years of not being able to score for love nor money when he played for us (except in the Carling Cup of course). Then, Middlesbrough put 10 men behind the ball for the rest of the game, Arsenal huffed and puffed but didn't really trouble the keeper, and eventually Kolo Toure scored an equaliser. The referee didn't help, giving lots Boro's way and being generally quite annoyingly incompetent, but Arsenal's lack of penetration was really what cost us.
It seems to me that Arsenal have a bit of a thing about "not losing" games at the moment. Ever since the unbeaten season, we seem to set great store in not losing, even when that means drawing far too many games. We have lost 1 league game this season, Manchester United have lost 4, but they are now above us in the league. We have drawn our last 4 games, and in some of them, Wenger has praised the never say die spirit of the team, and talked about how we refused to lose. If we had lost 2 of the last 4 games, and won the other 2, we would of course be 2 points better off, and still top of the league, so it is a very annoying obsession with "not losing".
Also, of course, the age old excuse is trotted out that Boro put 10 men behind the ball, and sat back on their one goal lead. Of course they did - what else could we expect in the circumstances? It is horrible to watch, and not why the Premier League is so popular worldwide, but the financial gap between Premiership and Championship is so great that teams have to play like that from a pragmatic point of view. Maybe the richness of the top flight will start to kill the spectacle, as teams play negatively through fear of relegation.
One thing is for sure, if you want to win the League, you have to have an answer to that - Manchester United and Chelsea usually do, and we do not. Either keep concentrating and don't concede the first goal; or pack your squad with enough firepower to overcome the defensiveness; or try a different (and more direct) way of playing. If you can't get results in these situations, you won't win the League, as we are surely about to find out.
Given this result, and the lottery nature of the Champions League (plus the fact that we would most likely have to play Liverpool, Chelsea and Man Utd or Barcelona in order to win it), the clever money has to be on Arsenal winning nothing (again) this season. Part of the reason is our squad, which by any measure is just too thin to be competing at the level we are trying to. To be fair, in August, nobody expected us to be challenging for anything at all - so we are overachieving in a sense. But it is annoying that the prospect of a League and Champions League challenge has been waved in front of us, only to turn out to be a mirage.
Not a good day for Arsenal fans. At the end of the day, we have to be getting better results than draws against Middlesbrough, Wigan and Birmingham if we want to be winning the League, it is as simple as that. We have taken 1 point from 2 games against Middlesbrough this season - everybody has their bogey teams, but that is ridiculous! The last few League performances have been very disappointing indeed, and with games against Chelsea, Bolton, Liverpool (x3) and Manchester United coming right up, things need to pick up quickly if our season is to avoid disintegrating rapidly from here. There is no bigger test than Chelsea away at the moment - they are probably on a better run of results than any team in the League at the moment - so next Sunday will be a big one.
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