If Arsenal win the Premier League this spring, I shan’t over-celebrate. No more than two or three criminal laws will be infracted in the opium-and-champagne lounge that I have booked for the occasion. Nor will I go on about it. The sequence of columns that will follow this sporting achievement (“What we talk about when we talk about Leandro Trossard”) shouldn’t continue much beyond October.
If the league is lost, on the other hand, there is nothing to do but shrug and accept that the squad perhaps lacked a forward of the very highest class. Either way, we will not have learnt much about Arsenal’s “mentality”. Nor their “make-up”. And least of all their “bottle”.
For talent is what decides these things. The idea that Arsenal have had enough of the stuff to win in the past but failed due to weak character, a certain Islingtonian effeteness, is hugely popular nonsense, even by the standards of modern psychobabble. The truth is that the squad was never quite complete and now, after vast investment, probably is.