Arsenal are going to win the Premier League, and musical theatre proves it | OneFootball

Each edition features an in-depth explainer on one of the week’s biggest tactical talking points, along with a few snippets of other curiosities I’ve spotted in recent matches. There’s even a Q&A section – your chance to weigh in on whatever nonsense has been going on lately.

I’m not really sure how else I can lay this out for you, so I’ll just condense it into one sentence: the best possible thing that can happen to Arsenal’s title challenge this season is the run of injuries they’re currently having, and I had this revelation while watching a musical on Broadway.

That’s the blurb. That’s what we’ve gone with on the back of this book. Arsenal are winning the league this season because of all these strained hammies, not in spite of them.

To start unpacking that: truly and genuinely, I do not think Arsenal fans see just what a foregone conclusion the title is this season. They are four points ahead, having travelled to Anfield, St James’ Park, Old Trafford and Craven Cottage – all grounds where they lost points last season, but where they got three wins out of four this time. They denied Manchester City a vital win at the very death and navigated three glaringly obvious banana skins (Palace, Burnley, and Ange Postecoglou’s first game) by winning them all to nil.

They have conceded five goals all season. Teams are getting, on average, about one solitary shot on target per game against them, and this has all happened while firmly mired in what would previously have been seen as an ‘injury crisis’.

Scores on the doors: they started the season without Bukayo Saka, whose return promptly coincided with Noni Madueke’s leg falling off. Kai Havertz ran around for the last few minutes of the Man United game and hasn’t been seen since.

Odegaard has missed the last few games; Gyokeres may or may not be fit; Calafiori was sent back from international duty; Norgaard arrived injured; Martinelli is still watching box-sets on the sofa with his leg up; and at the training ground, every single carton of milk has a picture of Gabriel Jesus on the back.

All of that, and again, they are top, four points ahead, and about as hard to break down as eating two full Weetabix dry.

And I know they still don’t believe all this. Last week I did a guest spot on an Arsenal podcast where the host, awash with trepidation, asked if “as a neutral” I thought it could maybe, possibly, sort of, perhaps be their year. Yes! You idiots! You’ve got the best squad and you’re playing the best football! Why are you all being so Tottenham about it!? Unclench your jaw!

I’m showing you how the sausage is made a little too much here, but the secret sauce/cheat code/skibidi rizz (delete depending on your age) is all in the xG. You can roll your eyes at that as much as you like, but the underlying numbers at both ends of the pitch have Arsenal on a different planet to their nearest rivals. Whether you think that’s all made-up bollocks or not, it is the part that will be alarming Guardiola and Slot the most. When combining every team’s xG for and xG against (statistical shorthand for ‘how’s it all going?’), Arsenal come out better than Liverpool and Manchester City… combined.

Combined! Your two most likely challengers, over a 38-game season, and 22 of their games aren’t posting the same numbers as 11 of yours. Your last game of the season is Crystal Palace away on Sunday the 24th of May; go and book Monday the 25th off work.

In fact, and here we are at the caramel centre of this piece, I’d go so far as to say that I can’t see anything happening on the pitch that could possibly derail this. Only some convoluted series of off-field events could even slow this march to the title, and that is why what is currently happening in the treatment room bodes superbly well for the remainder of the season.

For reasons I won’t get into here, I’ve recently become intimately knowledgeable about how musical theatre functions on both Broadway and the West End, and the whole dynamic of “the understudy” is so football-coded it’s scarcely believable. You simultaneously need people who are good enough to seamlessly slip into a part that is someone else’s entire lifework, but not so good that they think they should be doing it every night. The balance – the delicate, delicate balance – is that if your understudies are too talented, you won’t be giving them enough shows to keep them both happy and around.

Likewise, if they’re not talented enough – think Rob Holding coming in for Saliba the other year, God bless him – then the whole thing falls apart. Nobody feels comfortable taking the night off, and after a while, the lack of decent downtime starts to erode both your soul and your knee cartilage. Without togetherness, you’ll never get through the rough spots, and your supporting cast constantly worrying they’re squandering this one, precious, finite life does not foster a positive environment.

Arsenal’s problem has always been a lack of depth beyond that first XI, but this summer they brought in Zubimendi, Madueke, Gyokeres, Hincapie, Eze, Mosquera, and Kepa. There will be games this season where, if everyone’s fit, none of those players might start. However, as ‘understudies’ go, the difference between them and Kiwior, Tomiyasu, Jorginho, Jesus, Sterling, Tierney, and Zinchenko is genuinely staggering. But they know that as well as you do.

Not a single one of those names started more than 10 Premier League games last season, and you’d argue some of them were lucky to even get five. The players who’ve come in to replace them won’t settle for that, though – they’ll all believe they deserve to be first-choice, even if not necessarily right away. Injuries are never ideal, but they’re giving valuable exposure to players who might be tripping over their bottom lip without it.

If everyone’s happy, then it doesn’t matter if everyone’s fit. Trust me, it’s their year.

Discover the absurdities and oddities of the beautiful game with the Adam Clery Football Column (Independent)

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