Pickup artists have a concept called the Cat String Theory. It’s the idea that you attract someone by making them think you’re someone that they can’t have.
If you dangle a ball of string slightly above the reach of a cat, it will claw at it furiously. However, as soon as you give the cat the ball then the cat has won, and it quickly loses interest.
Arsenal Football Club, however unintentionally, has been employing the Cat String Theory on its fans for the past decade. Since 2005, the Gunners have seduced us with the tantalising prospect of ‘next year will be different’. But meaningful success, our ball of string, is always out of reach.
One would think that such malicious withholding would end an attraction after ten years. Surely the game would grow old, the attraction would die. But it doesn’t. The tragedy of being an Arsenal fan in 2015 is that most of us were Arsenal fans in 2004 too.
We witnessed real success – three Premier League titles and four FA cups in eight years, and the only team to ever go through a Premier League season unbeaten. So we think that if we claw hard enough at the ball of string that we’ll get it, because we had it in the past.
But the ghosts of Thierry Henry, Patrick Viera and Highbury are now more haunting than reassuring. Once a heartening testament to what could be achieved, they now serve as a sombre reminder of what no longer is.
It’s impossible to articulate how special it was to watch that turn of the century Arsenal team. I wasn’t even in high school for the Invincibles but I remember them as vividly as anything. They were Barcelona before Barcelona.
But they were even more endearing than Barca. Watching Barcelona is like watching a fully-oiled, purposeful machine. It’s a majestic and magical machine, but a machine nonetheless – you can see the immaculate structures and the logical progressions at work. Arsenal were never like that. They weren’t a machine, they were poets at the park.
Arsenal had no Xavi to conduct the orchestra, they just had Robert Pires, Dennis Bergkamp and Henry playing their own jazz solos on a whim. The beauty of that team though was that the solos would combine. Pires would start playing on the left, Bergkamp would take his lead, join the chorus and cut inside, and Henry would emerge for an encore, hitting the perfect note of ‘net’.
As magical as they were, that Arsenal team had plenty of steel too. Viera and Gilberto Silva were brick walls in midfield. Ashley Cole at left back and Freddie Ljungberg at right mid were ferocious runners, and Jens Lehmann bowed to no-one. Those guys were the bass players that set the rhythm and foundation for Thierry, Robert and Bergkamp to prosper.
Forgiving the 2005 FA Cup win over United on penalties (one of the most undeserving victories in sporting history, United had 20 shots to Arsenal’s five), prosperity has largely been absent from North London since the Invincibles season of 2003-04. The 2006 Champions League final loss to Barcelona, a narrow 2-1 defeat after playing virtually the entire game with ten men, would set the tone for the Emirates era – the first honourable loss in a decade defined by them.
The real tragedy of Arsenal since they moved to the Emirates for the 2006-07 season is that they’ve managed to finish in the top four every year without ever genuinely competing for a title or the Champions League. Somewhat farcically, they’ve made what should be an impressive feat into a near comic self-fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity. They’ve perfected the art of dangling that ball of string above our heads.
The cruellest thing about Arsenal is that they (we) never bottom out. We’re never given a season to take that sweet, cathartic breath and say ‘well this just wasn’t our year’. There is no respite from hope. The ball is never taken mercifully away from us. It just dangles, swaying in the bitter airspace known as ‘third or fourth’.
The tantalising nature of Arsenal stops for no one. Every time that it seems like they’re at a blockade, that the only way is back, they find a way to bounce right back up like a Whack-a-Worm at a carnival, teasing us with hope. There’s the 2-1 win in the Champions League against Barcelona, the 5-3 at Stamford Bridge or the 2-0 at the Etihad; games where it seems like yes, it’s starting to click.
But then immediately after the hope comes the pain. A fortnight after the win against Barcelona, they lost to Birmingham in the League Cup final. The 5-3 over Chelsea was a distant memory after the 4-0 loss to Milan in the Champions League. The win at City soon felt meaningless after losing 3-1 at home to Monaco, sentencing another Champions League campaign to the dumpster.
If we assume that pessimism about Arsenal and realism about Arsenal are two different concepts (a difficult argument to make), then using the second approach things may actually be looking up.
Mesut Özil and Alexis Sanchez are Wenger’s two best talent signings since Cesc Fabregas and Robin van Persie. Jack Wilshere, Aaron Ramsey, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Theo Walcott have all been injured or out of form and yet the team sits in second position with only six games to play. Those four players still represent the best young British core in the Premier League.
Regardless, I refuse to give in to optimism with this team. You can focus on the 4-1 over Liverpool, I’ll focus on the 3-1 under Monaco. I won’t reach for the dangle. This team, this coach, these fans, we are still living in the shadow of the Invincibles. Fairly or not, the success of this current team will be measured against Arsene’s first teams.
Of course, that success is not replicable – Nacho Monreal and Francis Coquelin aren’t leading an unbeaten season anytime soon – but it has to be approximate. An FA Cup win over Hull won’t do it. To emerge from the shadow this team needs to win the league or the Champions League.
After playing Moneyball for years, Arsenal can no longer hide under the pretence of financial inequality. If Liverpool, Dortmund and Atletico can launch serious threats at their respective leagues, then Arsenal has no excuse.
Maybe Sanchez and Özil will be able to emerge from the shadow which Fabregas, Van Persie and Samir Nasri could not. But we just don’t know. And after ten years of relative failure, we’re at the stage now where we have to see it. Arsene’s words no longer carry weight, they’re too far removed from any period of success to have authority.
I can’t ‘believe’ in this team anymore, I have to ‘know’ the success is real before I’ll accept it. Until then, I, and we, will have to content ourselves with memories of Highbury, however masochistic that may be.
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