Not Just Another Game

When Arsenal drew 2-2 with Tottenham at White Hart Lane in 2004, and promptly celebrated winning the title on our greatest rival’s own pitch, I was relaying the news to my mum in the garden having been following the game via the fantastic medium of teletext. A good few years later, and still without a Sky Sports subscription, I was sat in my room with my dad, listening to Five Live when David Bentley’s volley flew into the back of the Arsenal net. I witnessed my first Derby live in 2008, and unashamedly (at the time) left White Hart Lane with the score at 4-0 to the wrong team after an hour. Better memories came at the Emirates, after being fortunate enough to be present for both 5-2 victories in 2012.

This is the kind of madness and unpredictability that the North London Derby can bring.

Despite having technically already played our North London neighbours this season, a far greater level of significance, and therefore nervousness, is attached to this afternoon’s game at the Emirates.

For some, the general importance of the North London Derby has waned in recent years, and, despite what I’ve just said about memorable moments, the relative rarity of victories over, say, Chelsea, perhaps at times played larger in my mind.

This was not because I felt that Tottenham were particularly inferior to us; though Arsenal have been the more successful of the pair, in recent years those superior league positions have been closely run things, and there is an added credibility to the tie this year that I think both sides will revel in.

This is an Arsenal side with more potential than many that have come before it, perhaps stretching back even as far as those in the final days of Highbury, or our talented but flawed 2007/08 team. Every single player in the squad seems to be craving the league title this season, and that no longer seems a laughable suggestion (at least from my ever so slightly subjective viewpoint).

In short, this feels like something of a ‘put up or shut up’ season, both for Arsenal and perhaps in some ways for Arsene Wenger as well. Now, please don’t take that as me suggesting that the boss should go if he doesn’t deliver the title this season, because it is quite the opposite. With only a year left on his current contract after this, Arsene himself seemed to admit recently that he has at least begun to think about life after Arsenal, and with the club in a healthy position currently, there would be few better ways to bow out than with a first championship in twelve years (hey, it was good enough for Fergie).

Either way, with so many players in the squad reaching, or currently at, the peak of their careers, there is probably only a finite amount of time left for this particular team to achieve that. Our stoic defensive partnership of Per Mertesacker and Laurent Koscielny is 31 and 30 respectively. Neither is particularly old for a defender, but questions will abound as to how much longer they have left together as a truly title-winning pair. Perhaps our two best players, Alexis and Mesut Ozil, are currently enjoying what are supposedly their best years at 26 and 27, and I would hate to see their contributions go unrewarded. Santi Cazorla is 30, Olivier Giroud 29.

My point here being that it kind of feels like if we want to do this, we have to do it now. We might never have a better opportunity to break the mould that we fell into with our move to the Emirates, and to prove our critics wrong about sustaining our performances over a 38 game season.

Spurs will be looking towards their future with slightly more anticipation than trepidation I would imagine, and finally seem to have a clear sense of direction going forward. Mauricio Pochettino is a manager who I am not ashamed to admit that I admire, and he is working with a young squad who look like they will only improve in the near future at least.

There is therefore, if not a greater sense of importance, a great deal more grandeur to this tie this time around. Add to this the fact that this is a genuine rivalry between two clubs who simply cannot amicably coexist alongside one another in North London, and you have all the ingredients for a truly classic encounter.

My dislike for our neighbours does not translate into any ill-feeling towards their supporters, one of my best friends is a Spurs fan himself, but my weekend does improve just that little bit when results do not go their way. I’m sure they’ve felt exactly the same way whilst we’ve been embarrassing ourselves in the cup competitions so far this season.

That’s why, for the first time in quite a while, this afternoon’s game feels like one of the matches of the season so far. This time, it is not an important game because we are on a losing streak, and are in desperate need of turning our season around as early as possible, or because there is a sense of disgruntlement at the lack of high profile additions to the squad (even if this has shifted somewhat to disgruntlement about there being almost no additions to the squad whatsoever).

This game is important because it is between a team who is on the verge of putting together a shot at a legitimate title challenge for the first time in a fair while, and another with reinstalled confidence and purpose hoping to push on this season in a way that many have been waiting on for years. It just so happens that there is a healthy dose of history and rivalry thrown into the mix as well.
Last season, when Arsenal lost 2-1 at White Hart Lane, there was a passion lacking from our performance that perhaps at that point betrayed a lack of gravitas to the occasion. When the second 5-2 happened at the Emirates, Tottenham might have been accused of the same problem, with Arsenal more readily embracing the almost exaggerated lustre afforded to these games.

They do mean so much though, whether they ultimately alter the outcome at the end of the season or not, and that’s not just for the fans, but for the players too. I can’t imagine that it would be easy to calm down Alexis if he scores a belter in the game later, or Francis Coquelin for that matter (albeit a slightly less likely scenario). Though Gabriel, having never played in a North London Derby before, believed upon his arrival at the club that Chelsea, rather than Spurs, were our biggest rivals, that impression might well have changed by full time today.

I’m more excited (and nervous) than I have been for a long time today, and someone from one of the sides is going to be a hero after the game, joining the likes of Thierry Henry, Gareth Bale and *cough cough* Mathieu Flamini in the annals of history.

And then we do it all over again on 5th March, which might feel even more significant than this by the time that we get there. Here’s hoping that if that’s the case, it’s for all the right reasons, but let’s get through this one first.