To lose their ‘fear’, Arsenal must rediscover a sense of fun

Theo Walcott preyed upon his former side — and time is running out for Mikel Arteta to find a solution

Gabriel reacts after fouling Theo Walcott to earn himself a second booking (Getty Images)

After pulling another brick from the foundation of his old home, Theo Walcott grinned with childish glee and then killed with the kindness. “I felt a lot of fear tonight in Arsenal, to be honest,” he said, in an inadvertently withering assessment. It would be easy for Arsenal to take insult, if only it hadn’t been so glaringly obvious. Be it a first half of timid incoherency, their ongoing creative plight or Gabriel’s reckless abandon and resulting red card, this torrid run of results has inevitably left Mikel Arteta’s side a spectre of themselves.

The burden seems increasingly heavy to bear for Arteta, who will take refuge in the fact that his players squeezed themselves of last drop to scrape a 1-1 draw. When he arrived at the Emirates, aiming to resurrect Arsenal from one of their lowest ebbs, the Spaniard effused inspiration, imagination and ideals. There was to be a cultural reset - or rather an extinction of what previously existed, a new hardline set of principles, and an exciting brand of football learnt under Pep Guardiola. Yet, little over a year later, it’s hard to pinpoint which, if any, of those fundamental changes have truly taken hold.

Division at the club is still rife, with Mesut Ozil’s exclusion an incessant unsettling factor. Three red cards in five games paint a picture of ill-discipline, naivety or desperation, and perhaps a combination of all three. Meanwhile, Arsenal’s style of play is currently drifting somewhere between the unimaginative and the anaesthetic, too mundane to actually be pinned down.

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It is not necessarily that Arsenal’s squad cannot see Arteta’s vision but that, in pursuing it, they seem to have also been deprived of their individuality, the freedom to take risks and trust instincts. That was epitomised by their brightest spark against Southampton, Bukayo Saka, who only turned 19 in September. He is extraordinarily talented but also blessed with inexperience, his youthful exuberance unblemished by the churn and the slide, and it was little surprise that his daring waltz past three players was what conjured Arsenal’s equaliser. Otherwise, Arsenal seem unwilling - or able - to step out of their straitjacket at all, petrified of making a mistake as their manager orchestrates relentlessly from the touchline.

It is not to doubt Arteta’s intuition or the improvements he has made - notably in defence, but simply to acknowledge that while it feels as though everything has changed at Arsenal, equally not much has at all. And that is a problem - of poor strategy and lackadaisical habits - that was entrenched long before Arteta’s arrivals, and still seems impossible to uproot. Perhaps, it was the club’s former midfielder, Emmanuel Petit, who put it best. "The anger I had has given way to indifference,” he told RMC last night. “I try to detach myself from everything as much as possible to avoid losing my head over it... It is a logical response to what has been happening for years now.”

Patience is football’s scarcest commodity and, although Arsenal’s hierarchy gave clear backing to Arteta during the week, there must be some form of break to this interminable decline, be it in resurgence or resignation. With just two points from the previous 18 available, this is a spiral that simply cannot be sustained. It is the lack of goals, though, which should be most concerning, even if Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang finally ended a dispiriting 10-game goal drought. Fluid attacking football has long defined Arsenal and, without it, questions over their identity will sting,

Ask any Arsenal supporter and they’ll tell you it is that hope that kills. Walcott knows that all too well. He has seen these realities under various different guises, suffered the wrath of expectations and finally rediscovered the sense of childlike fun in his football at Southampton. Amid the heaving dread at the Emirates, that is what Arsenal require more than anything; to not just play their football, but actually enjoy it. They must still be prepared to “take bullets”, as Arteta opined earlier this week, but if they are able to relax, to shed the fear that Walcott recognised and pounced upon, it might help Arsenal stop shooting themselves in the foot. 

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