Dave Tickner: Fading heavyweights clash at Emirates

For those of us who grew up with the first 15 years of the Premier League, Sunday’s game at the Emirates was an odd spectacle.

Arsenal v Manchester United. Over the course of a decade around the millennium, this was the English top flight’s must-watch fixture. 

Between a successful local businessman bankrolling a middling club to glory with a few million quid in 1995 and a billionaire Russian oligarch repeating the trick at slightly greater cost 10 years later, the Premier League was a two-man show. United and Arsenal. Ferguson and Wenger.

The two great Premier League dynasties won nine league titles in a row from 1996 to 2004. In six of those nine seasons, the other finished runner-up. Between 1997 and 2005, neither finished outside the top three.

Consistently, for a decade, Arsenal and Manchester United produced some of the most thrilling, high-octane, high-quality contests of the era. And not just in England, not just in football, but any sport anywhere. In those days it was even possible for Arsenal fans to say the rivalry with Manchester United was bigger than that with Spurs and it not sound like a weak banter.

Arsenal v Manchester United was the Premier League. With a handful of points often separating the pair in the table and nobody else able to compete, these clashes often carried the whiff of title deciders. Sometimes, they literally were.

The rivalry was as real and intense and – crucially – bitter as any local derby.

It is against this backdrop, then, this shared history, that the two ageing heavyweights lumbered around the soulless Emirates Stadium, swinging wildly and unable to land a blow until Arsenal managed to drag something from the depths of their muscle memory to land a knockout one-two punch in the second half.

But for these has-been heavyweights this was no title clash. It may allow Arsenal to sneak fifth. It gave Arsene Wenger a victory at last over Jose Mourinho at the 13th attempt. It ended the most dispiriting, toothless and inconsequential 25-match unbeaten run in football history. It mathematically secured Tottenham’s place in the Champions League group stage. It gave Mourinho the chance to play one of his trademark look-at-me diversions in the hope that nobody would notice just what a rotten league season his team has had.

It was a poor game between, by the lofty standards set by two teams who came to define the Premier League’s first 15 years, two poor teams.

Mourinho, who had so successfully solved the problems posed by Chelsea’s superbly-drilled back three only weeks ago, came utterly unstuck against Arsenal’s last-resort desperate facsimile. Having used two strikers against Chelsea, Mourinho played Anthony Martial up front on his own here. 

It was, perhaps, all part of his protest against the fact that progress in cup competitions means, and this is news to all of us, you have to play more games. Frankly it’s a miracle that, having only been able to invest £200m in his squad last summer, Mourinho has been able to guide his team as close as 16 points to the top spot.

While Mourinho was busily and noisily hacking off his nose after taking umbrage at his own reflection, Wenger at least conducted himself with quiet dignity during and after a victory that, however insignificant in the broad scheme of the 2016/17 season may yet help keep him in a job.

Defeat to United here on the back of last weekend's limp capitulation in White Hart Lane’s final North London Derby could easily have left Wenger all-in on an FA Cup final against a demonstrably superior Chelsea side. Now, at least, he has another straw upon which to clutch. He can still mix it with another heavyweight, even if both are long past their brilliant best.