Nottingham Forest 0-0 Arsenal
How naive and, frankly, forgetful I am. There I was thinking we might find a way of making this all a bit less stressful than it needs to be. Two goalless draws later…
It’s not that we’re not well placed – that’s positively not what I’m saying, despite the double negatives – but by god this team knows how to put us through the ringer.
I’ve probably lived through about 8 proper title races (not just us farting around on the edges, grunting, which I’ve seen plenty of too) and I honestly don’t know if it’s worse this season or if it’s always been like this.
I certainly think that a) 22 years b) three times a bridesmaid c) who we’re up against have parachuted additional nerves into this one, but I don’t think that d) our inability to really put our feet on the gas and e) our lack of a prolific striker have helped my tender emotional state either.
Surely I was a bag of angst during the invincible season too? I had a look through some of my blog posts of that season and I seem remarkably upbeat throughout. When we got dumped out of the FA Cup that year, I said this:
“We cannot play Harlem Globetrotter football every match, and we must be allowed off-days; the players are only human beings. Furthermore, we have three more games this week, and our players are already feeling the physical strain of their achievements.”
How measured is that! There are some truths in there that ring true today. No team can be brilliant week after week (City have taken 3 points from 12, lest we forget), and January’s schedule is ludicrous.
But the Harlem Globetrotters part is interesting too, and may be playing a part in my nerves. We’re a fantastic defensive team, and have options and depth all over the park that we could only have dreamed of in years gone by. We’re seven points clear, for god’s sake. We’re in a great position.
But – and maybe it’s because the standard in the league is so high, or maybe we just haven’t quite found our magic attacking formula yet – every point feels like hard work at the moment.
Or maybe that’s just the way it always was, and always will be, when you’re in a title race.
As you say, it’s a combination of factors that fuel the anxieties most of us are feeling. At the start of the season we would all have taken being 7 points clear in mid-January, but the dropped points in games we really should have won or drawn are beginning to add up alarmingly. I make it a minimum 6 and possibly as many as 10. And in all but one of the games we haven’t won we’ve had the higher xG. We cannot afford to keep doing this. The pressure is going to mount as the season progresses and the fear of missing out again could become crippling if we don’t maintain a sizeable gap. Not looking forward to next weekend. A resurgent Man U with nothing to lose and a full week to prepare is probably the last thing we need right now. Crazy to be this stressed though when you look at the table!
It’s crazy… but also based on reality!