Saluting Andy Carroll’s incredibly bittersweet hat-trick vs. Arsenal in 2016 | OneFootball

Many thousands of words have been used to describe the unique recipe of emotions that characterise football fandom.

Anger, of course. Pettiness is an underrated ingredient, the almond essence that enhances the cake. Abject misery makes up a large proportion, while fleeting moments of joy keep us all coming back for more.

But the most interesting emotion, in football and life itself, is surely bittersweetness. Nothing is more human than a happy memory tinged with sadness or regret, nor the complexity of something that didn’t quite work out as it could have.

And it’s now 10 years since the most bittersweet match in modern Premier League history; a barnstorming 3-3 draw between West Ham and Arsenal that thrilled everybody, but one that nobody involved can look back on with total satisfaction.

Upton Park, April 2016. One of English football’s great bearpits was a month away from extinction. The mood on Green Street for this lunchtime kick-off was boisterous as Slaven Bilic’s Hammers pushed for an unlikely Champions League spot.

The visitors to East London were in the middle of their periodic April angst. This was a stereotypical late-Wenger Arsenal team, a prettily assembled Easter Egg with a trademark hollow centre.

Laurent Koscielny and Gabriel Paulista were comfortable on the ball, but didn’t exactly inspire confidence at the heart of defence. Their vulnerability was a red rag to West Ham’s resident bull.

The trajectory of Andy Carroll’s career was already set by mid-2016. His breakthrough at Newcastle was the prelude to a miserable £35million move to Liverpool, with the striker strikingly out of place like a horse entered into Crufts.

Rescued by Sam Allardyce and brought to West Ham, Carroll had alternated between short bursts of form and long spells on the treatment table.

But no player has ever been more ‘unplayable on their day’ than the Big Geordie. Bilic instructed his full-backs to play sharp crosses into Carroll, allowing the pace of the ball and his imposing frame to do the rest.

Initially, the plan was ineffective. Buoyed after West Ham had an opener dubiously ruled out for offside, Arsenal swept into a 2-0 lead via almost-identical finishes from Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez.

The Upton Park cauldron had been dampened as the clock ticked towards half-time. But Carroll was already threatening to stir.

He’d been booked within four minutes for a wild lunge on Koscielny and pulled off a wild overhead kick in the build-up to the offside goal, comparable with a table footballer being spun violently on its axis.

It came as no surprise when he emphatically butted home an Aaron Cresswell cross to halve the deficit. David Ospina fell backwards with little protest, as if seeing a vision of what was to come. Game on.

Carroll’s second came minutes later and was even more glorious. He rectified his own mishit shot by twisting his entire body to bludgeon home a left-footed volley.

Fittingly, it largely came off his shin. Most of Upton Park regarded those semantics as irrelevant in the midst of elation. Arsenal had crumbled in time-honoured fashion.

Any sense the players used half-time to simmer down was soon extinguished, the commotion of Carroll’s presence acting as a catalyst for the game’s tempo.

Already on a yellow card, the West Ham striker tangled with Gabriel, Koscielny and Ospina in separate incidents, happily dragging his opponents into the mud.

The bedlam reached its crescendo seven minutes after the break. Michail Antonio, who ended up at right-back in Bilic’s kamikaze system, burst into the penalty area and stood up a cross to the far post.

Carroll loomed over Hector Bellerin as if recreating a solar eclipse. The resulting header triggered celebrations of a rare joy and disbelief.

This was the apex of Carroll’s career, all of his qualities blossoming in a seven-minute period. Calls to take the striker to Euro 2016 intensified after this game, shipping this modern Big Bertha out to France to deal with assorted continentals.

Ever the curmudgeon, Mark Lawrenson declared picking him would ‘be like going back to the dark ages’. Roy Hodgson resisted the temptation.

Carroll would spark occasionally thereafter – look up his acrobatic volley against Crystal Palace in 2017 – but soon resumed his habitation in the treatment room and never fulfilled his potential.

Arsenal poured forwards in desperation, eventually equalising through Koscielny as West Ham heroically refused to keep things tight.

A draw suited neither side; Arsenal slipped further behind Leicester in the title race, while the Hammers eventually finished four points off the Champions League places in seventh. An opportunity had ultimately been missed.

The what-ifs were crystallised, especially for the home side who never again had the same mix of talent and emotion potent enough to rock the big boys.

Eight months later, Arsenal came to the London Stadium and used the wide open spaces to thrash West Ham 5-1. Something precious had been lost forever, squandered in the hope of progress.

The six-goal thriller at Upton Park also marked the end of something bigger. That summer, Pep Guardiola arrived in England and set about systemising the domestic game away from such chaos.

Success led to imitation. Managers like Bilic and Wenger, with their faith in gifted individuals, quickly became dated at the top level.

Looking back from a decade’s vantage point, this match was akin to seeing pictures of European holidaymakers in July 1914 who didn’t appreciate how the landscape was about to change irrevocably.

This wasn’t just a genuinely riotous Premier League classic; it was also one of the last of its kind.