Despite the hysteria, it is business as normal for Arsenal

The manager has had enough. He is set to retire, and if not, he should leave. The nation’s most popular pundit is at war with the club’s fans. The team is in meltdown. This is an all-time low.

Welcome to Arsenal, where all of those statements are probably untrue but, with the entirely artificial sense of crisis that seems to pervade around the club, some think they are. A tendency towards over-reaction seems a symptom of modern times, but feels especially prevalent where Arsenal are concerned. It is all the more misplaced given they are the most consistent club in the country. They are not as consistently successful as supporters would like and have too few trophies since 2005, but in 20 seasons, they have never genuinely failed. And no one else can say that.

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Yet the last week has brought suggestions Arsene Wenger is on the brink. The last fortnight has prompted a strange row between Gary Neville and Arsenal Fan TV, with the semi-reconciliation of the former Manchester United captain appearing on the YouTube channel. The last four games have brought three defeats. The last match brought more calls for Wenger to go.

Yet as two of those losses were to Chelsea and Bayern Munich, it is business as usual. Arsenal even replicated last season’s result at the Allianz Arena: 5-1 followed 5-1. Can it really be a nadir if it is a repeat scoreline? When history repeats itself, historic depths have not been plumbed. Instead, a team that tend to lose to superior sides have done so again, and in similar style. A club that often finish fourth are fourth. So far, they are neither going forwards nor backwards. As it stands, Wenger is still ahead of Jurgen Klopp and Jose Mourinho in the table; not bad for someone supposedly in terminal decline.

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Admittedly, he is yet to commit to a new deal but the Frenchman has left it late to re-sign in the past. That he is 67 is a factor in citing suggestions he could retire; so, too, the way it is hard to see Arsenal winning the league under him again, let alone the Champions League. Yet that has been the case for much of the past decade.

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Ian Wright popped up to say that an evening with his old manager gave him the impression he was ready to hang up the coat with the faulty zipper. Wright is as entitled to try and read between the lines as anyone. As a former player of Wenger’s, his view ought to count more than most. Yet the reality is that he only played for the Frenchman for 20 months, the last of them 19 years ago. The notion that the best person to determine if Wenger had decided to leave, or the one he would confide in, was someone he last selected in 1998 is questionable at best.

Wright spoke the evening before Arsenal beat Hull 2-0. It was remarkable the number of people who seemed to expect Arsenal to lose at home to a relegation-threatened team. There is this odd perception, a further product of hysteria, that Arsenal invariably go into freefall with a couple of defeats. They rarely do. They have a peculiar psyche. They rarely display the mental strength to win enough games when the title is on the line or the chance to beckons the last eight of the Champions League beckons, but they have sufficient strength to respond to a couple of setbacks. It has been demonstrated time and again.

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The lows can be very low – the 8-2 loss to Manchester United, the 6-0 thrashing at Chelsea, the twin 5-1 defeats to Bayern – but, for all the amplified sense of drama, their slumps tend to be short. Consider the run Liverpool went on before beating Tottenham: five league games without a win. For all the invective, Arsenal have not done that since 2009, and even then it was an unbeaten sequence. In all competitions, Jurgen Klopp’s team had only won once in 10 games. That has never happened to Wenger’s Arsenal: even their worst 10-game run had included at least two victories.

If losing at Chelsea was eminently predictable, being beaten at home by Watford belonged in a different category: rare but not unknown. Arsenal have the equivalent of that result once or twice a season at the Emirates Stadium; West Ham and Swansea won there in 2015-16, Swansea again in 2014-15, Aston Villa in 2013-14, Swansea yet again in 2012-13 and Wigan in 2011-12.

Yet they do not send them into a tailspin. Arsenal they have recorded at least 67 points every season under Wenger, and usually over 70. Given their famously undistinguished record against the best, especially away, it proves, at least to those who study the facts, how reliable they tend to be at picking up points against the rest, particularly at home.

They have plenty of wins against the lesser lights, some to halt mini-slumps, some, as in the recent Burnley and Hull games, unconvincing, some more emphatic. They have a greater immunity to shocks than most: their Cup exits to lower-league opponents, like Blackburn four years ago or Sheffield Wednesday in last season’s League Cup, tend to be the exceptions, not the rule. It is something to bear in mind when anyone tips them to lose at Sutton on Monday.

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Arsenal’s consistency spreads across competitions. They have exited the Champions League in the last 16 every year since 2010, and will do so again. With the exception of the 2015 defeat to Monaco, they have gone out each time to a better team with better players, just as they have always qualified from the group stages at the expense of lesser sides with lesser players. They have always been between the ninth and 16th best team in Europe and have departed at the appropriate stage. In virtually every year, it is neither overachievement nor underachievement. It can be frustrating, and that is understandable, but it is not calamitous. The manner of Wednesday’s thrashing at Bayern was damning, but Arsenal still progressed from the last 32, unlike Tottenham this season or United last.

And it all makes the noise surrounding what is actually normality seems excessive. Hysteria may surround Arsenal, but it should not. There have been plenty of genuine crisis clubs in Wenger’s long reign, but Arsenal have never been among them.