Oh Arsenal fans, you amateurs. You thought the turbulent late-Wenger years had taught you to suffer – all those embarrassing losses to the Premier League’s tadpoles, Theo running, Theo stopping, Theo tackled, all those predictably brief Champions League runs, perennially failing your way to another fourth-place league finish to the soundtrack of Piers Morgan’s petulant wailing – God what misery it is to be an Arsenal fan, you thought. What purgatorial spite, what embers of hope so cruelly drenched, year after year.
You pathetic amateurs. You haven’t a clue.
On Sunday afternoon a crescendo of suffering – a shrieking, deceitful, Beckettian crescendo that for so long sounded like a waltz – peaked at St. James’ Park and came crashing down on the white half of North London. Our best team since the 1960s, a miraculous coming together of unlikely young Englishmen and rejuvenated foreign talents, smited on the Northern Rock. Sorry fellers, this century’s fairytale quota has already been spent, there’s nowt we can do.
We flew too high. A combined seven unanswered goals past Stoke and Manchester United in April gave us a real if outside chance of catching Leicester. A stumble from them and we could – as Harry Kane expressed on his Instagram with a picture of a pack of lions – pounce. But lions can’t fly (what a ridiculous notion, Harry) and in the rarefied air of a title chase West Brom equalized and Dele Alli’s little-shit schtick came home to roost: a three-game ban for a schoolboy swing, out for the season. Title hopes on life support. But still, a 5 point gap to Arsenal.
Then came Chelsea, a team of zombie champions whose only contribution to the season has been a massive weekly hit of schadenfreude for everyone else in England. Eden Hazard, the purest personification of Chelsea’s mighty under-performance with no goals and no visible effort expended by late April, publicly expressed his desire to see Leicester take the title. Any further points dropped would see the midlanders take the title, and deep within his small reptilian brain he saw the opportunity to make his mark. And so when Hazard joined the fray at halftime – and it indeed was a fray, a real re-telling of the Battle of Stamford Bridge worthy of the 1066 original – he set about an overheated, Alli-less Spurs team with the athleticism and clarity of purpose that won him a deserved Player of the Year last time out, bending a beautiful equalizer past Hugo Lloris.
Something broke that match in the minds of this young, so young, barely post-pubescent, Spurs team. Their calm deserted them, as did Mousa Dembélé, a pillar of strength throughout the season who joined Alli in the FA’s Monopoly-board prison for clawing crazily at Diego Costa’s face – do not pass go, do not pick up 3 points. Southampton, normally an easy fixture, sealed a 2-1 win at White Hart Lane through a Sean Davis brace, and with a draw at Manchester City, Arsenal closed the gap to one win. A draw at relegated Newcastle on the final day would be just enough to postpone St. Totteringham’s day, but wouldn’t it be funny, wouldn’t it be fucking hilarious, if Spurs were to lose that match?
Imagine if they lost, that even after being the prime victims of the Leicester City fairytale, in a year in which so the narrative goes they finally vanquished all their traditional rivals and scored the most goals, conceded the fewest and played the best football, but still came second – surely the epitome of Spursiness – that choice ability to find new and inventive ways to fail, the team’s only reliable quality – a prime cut of Spursiness – and then came third anyway? To Arsenal? On the last fucking day of the season? After shipping three goals in 20 minutes to 10-man relegated Newcastle when it looked like a comeback might be on? The sickness of mind needed to imagine such cruelty. The perversity.
At the end of the aforementioned Beckett’s tragicomic Waiting for Godot, one of the main characters tries to hang himself with his belt; he fails and his trousers fall down. Well string me up, you fucker, for it doesn’t get worse than this.
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