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Arsenal Need to Take the Fight to Their Title Rivals, or Face Failing Again
- Updated: November 23, 2016
The thing about any window of opportunity is that it will inevitably creak shut sooner or later, and momentary glimpses of hope are exactly that, momentary.
At 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho will each have been encouraged by a sliver of daylight creeping in, although it wasn’t long before it was snuffed out.
Both craved a win—Mourinho to blow away the growing doubts that are collecting around his tenure like cobwebs and to make inroads into the gap between his side and the top four; Wenger to puncture the thickening sense of inferiority felt towards his bete noir built up over 12 years of winless head-to-head encounters. But if neither manager had wanted a draw here, then they certainly didn’t want the one that was served up.
United were not bad, but no better, and they dropped two points at the death, while Arsenal were, for long periods at Old Trafford, little better than awful.
It was telling that in the buildup to the game, most commentators were moist not with anticipation but with nostalgia, the fires stoked by battles fought between these two rather than those still to be fought.
United against Arsenal as a matchup is primarily now a fixture with not much other than history in its corner, and that trend was fatally exposed on Saturday. This United side are not title contenders and are outsiders at best to return to the Champions League; Arsenal long since seem to have lost the appetite for engaging their title rivals in the kind of free-flowing attacking football that comes so easily against sides in the bottom half of the table.
It was a recipe for disappointment, and on Saturday lunchtime, disappointment came served in doleful spoonfuls of gristle and grey.
That frantic urgency that used to stalk this fixture is gone, but both sides—and this applies particularly to Arsenal—need to find a way to bring some immediacy back to a season that could easily be put out of its rhythm by a game like this.
In years gone by, Wenger’s sides have emerged from these high-octane romps gilded, if not always with a result. In 1998, when Marc Overmars outwitted John Curtis and stole a 1-0 win, it set Arsenal on their way to a six-week winning spree that carried them to the title.
The following season, a battling 1-1 draw in a freezing February mudbath was the catalyst for two points dropped from 11 games. Kanu glistened on his Premier League debut; Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira scratched lumps out of each other; Dwight Yorke put a penalty into the advertising boards; Nicolas Anelka and Andy Cole exchanged perfectly taken goals. It was a filthy night in Manchester, and it put bloodlust up both sides.
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