ARSENAL WILT UNDER CUP PRESSURE

ARTETA'S TEAM WILTS UNDER THE WEIGHT OF FATIGUE, IS IT HIS PROBLEM?

You know my feelings on domestic cups as we build towards something special with an imperfect squad: they’re not worth it.

However, once you get to a semi-final, you’re one game away from Wembley, and they suddenly become very much worth it. My hope for last night was at least a fight to the death in the mosh pit of St. James’ Park… in the end, it was a school dance, we were the nerds, and Newcastle walked away with an Uber Black full of hot babes.

This is a trigger warning—I’m not even going to disguise that I need an emergency shot of copium to get through this. We’re running out of veins this season, so it’ll be a between-the-toes type of delivery.

I have to hold onto the Premier League result from the weekend in my head: We beat Manchester City 5-1. Rattled the whole country with our sauce. Arsenal put themselves very much on a path to a title run and a Champions League run. If you gave me the choice of which game I could pick for a demolition, it’d be the City game.

This is relevant because I think it’s hard to imagine that a game of that magnitude on a Sunday didn’t weigh on the players’ mental headspace last night. My feeling is that it might have affected them in two ways: 1) It focused them on the big tournaments, and 2) It might have given them less reason to fight.

This is a huge supposition on my part, but I have to hunt for one because that’s the first time this season I’ve watched a game and felt it lacked the usual fight and desire we’ve come to expect. After Isak broke us after 4 minutes—with a goal that was very harshly called offside—it was clear we didn’t think we could win the game.

There were mistakes all over the pitch, we were losing duels, and we were generally quite poor in the final third. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I wrote yesterday that we usually get a quick slap after we mess the bed during a transfer window, and it all happened in the first half.