Arsenal yearn to be ruthless as Manchester City loom at their back

Eight points shrunk to six at Anfield. Now six have withered to four at the London Stadium on Sunday after Arsenal let a 2-0 lead slip for the second successive game. The numbers still favour them in the title race, even if Manchester City win their yet-to-be-arranged game in hand against Brighton to reduce the gap to a single point. But the lead has been halved within a week and, with it, the psychology of the Premier League pursuit is transformed. The creeping dread of the Manchester City machine — debugged of its early season chinks and switched on to its terrifyingly clinical autopilot mode — is now upon the leaders. They have planted both feet on Arsenal’s doorstep and, unlike when they were stalking Liverpool in 2018-19, they have brought Mr Wolf up front with them this time. There will be those who will say this is all evidence of Arsenal choking, but it is more that they are finally feeling the squeeze of City raising the bar. Arsenal don’t have any more lives to spare. Their leeway is gone, which frankly sounds ridiculous given they are still on course to accrue more than 90 points. Such is the extent to which Pep Guardiola’s team have recalibrated what is required to be Premier League champions. The usual twist and turns have been replaced by two parallel lines. Any late missteps detonate title hopes. It is why the sense of inevitability Arsenal have been staving off for so long is now beginning to set in. Liverpool found out four years ago how unrelenting the pressure is when they were left to rue winning only 13 of their final 18 games. Arsenal have won nine from 15 in the league since the turn of the year — that is not the kind of form that will prevent City from overtaking. Being the pacesetters for so long requires flawless mental strength and implementation. It requires boundless stamina, months of knowing only perfection is enough. It is like running a marathon knowing you need to match the world record as the tracker clips your heels with every stride. That makes teams sweat. It puts them on edge and, even though Arsenal had been so considered and precise while Thomas Partey and Martin Odegaard were slicing through West Ham’s shape at will in the opening half hour, as soon as the momentum shifted you could see collective stress take hold. Once might be forgivable, but the same thing happened against Liverpool. The concern for Mikel Arteta is that neither he nor any of his leaders on the park — including the best efforts of Odegaard, who was flawless and asked his team-mates to calm down in the second half — could arrest the decline in performance. Had Bukayo Saka converted his second-half penalty to re-establish the two-goal lead, then maybe it would all have been very different. In the end, even that miss felt like a reminder of creeping tension. One Arsenal supporter cannot watch as his team throw away a two-goal lead for a second week in succession (Photo: Alex Pantling/Getty Images) Was this 2-2 draw at West Ham the delayed hangover from the Sporting Lisbon defeat, when another lead was lost? Or was it mental fatigue from months of suffocating pressure finally taking its toll? “I would say, yes, if I saw a team playing from the beginning like…” Arteta started, before tensing and holding his breath to get across his point. “When I see a team playing with that flow, that’s not. “At 2-0, certainly it’s not the pressure. It’s that we misunderstood what the game needed in that moment. “We need that ruthless mindset in those moments. When you don’t do that in the Premier League, at some stage it’s going to turn around with the momentum and then you have to defend, for example, the second goal much better than we did. If not you don’t win the game.” The youthful energy fuelling Arteta’s team has been trumpeted, but this is a group of players — bar the ex-City pair Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko — who are experiencing the pressure of a title race for the first time. They have dared to take on Guardiola’s seasoned winners by attacking the first two bends with the carefree exuberance of innocent challengers. But we are into the serious stuff now and, with William Saliba already out, a groin issue picked up by Zinchenko meant Arteta was missing two of his first-choice back four on Sunday. Arsenal were masters of their own downfall to present West Ham with a penalty in the 33rd minute, gifting them a way back into a game from which they had already appeared to have checked out. The home fans had been booing their team’s lack of input up until then. Partey’s casualness in possession, being trampled over by Declan Rice in the build-up, came to signify the game’s pivotal point. David Moyes said the key to his side turning the contest was managing finally to exert pressure high up on Arsenal. Early on, that had been utterly beyond them. He also pointed to his players’ ability to thrust the ball in behind the Arsenal defence more than they had done all season — an indication of how they succeeded in rattling the league leaders through the running of Michail Antonio. Remaining Premier League fixtures April 21 Southampton (H) April 26 Arsenal (H) April 26 Man City (A) April 30 Fulham (A) May 2 Chelsea (H) May 3 West Ham (H) May 7 Newcastle (A) May 7 Leeds Utd (H) May 14 Brighton (H) May 14 Everton (A) May 20 Nottm Forest (A) May 20 Chelsea (H) May 28 Wolves (H) May 28 Brentford (A) TBC Brighton (A) “We made a huge mistake to stop playing with the same purpose to score the third and fourth one, just thinking we could play around them and maintain the result, ” said Arteta. “It just looked too easy. At that moment, we gave them hope. “Credit to West Ham — they took it. They defended really well. They started to play extremely direct with long throws and corners. If you don’t defend the box the way you should with the two goals that we conceded, then you have to do many things better than what we did. “There is another moment where you could go 3-1 up after 50 minutes and probably the game is over. Two minutes after that you concede the equaliser. This is part of football. My worry is that after 2-0, we made that huge mistake and didn’t understand what the game required in the moment.” Arteta continually waved his arms in frustration at the decision-making of his players and their inability to control the emotional balance of the game. At full-time, Gabriel had sunk to the floor wearing the look of a man struggling to compute what had just happened. Southampton at home is about the best fixture Arsenal could wish for next but, given they have a trip to Manchester City after that, how they respond will decide whether this still goes to the wire. They rallied after a run of three games without a league win in January — a 1-0 loss to Everton, a 1-1 draw with Brentford and a 3-1 loss to Manchester City — by whipping up a seven-game winning streak. Only a repeat will be enough to complete a title charge that has suffered two heavy dents in the last week.