Arsenal appear to be out of steam as financial gravity brings them down

What if the Queen hadn’t died when she did? If she hadn’t, Arsenal would have faced PSV Eindhoven in the Europa League in September and that game wouldn’t have had to be played in the midweek slot when they’d been slated to host Manchester City.

Arsenal would have gone into what could prove the defining game of the season in October on a run of seven straight victories, having beaten Tottenham and Liverpool in their previous two home league matches, while City would have been coming off a 1-0 defeat at Liverpool. As it was, Arsenal were fretting in their worst run of the season, while City were just beginning to emerge from a post-World Cup blip. But still they’ll blame the referees.

Arsenal are level at the top with a game in hand, but the sense of momentum has gone. It’s true they’ll win the league if they draw away to City in April and win their other 15 games – and few before the season began would have predicted anything like that – but nobody at the club can be looking beyond Aston Villa on Saturday and getting out of this run of four games without a victory. Having dropped seven points in the first half of the season, they have let eight go in the first three games of the second. Eight-point leads, once squandered, are seldom regained.

The slump began at City in the FA Cup. At the time, a 1-0 defeat felt almost like the perfect result for Arsenal: even with a weakened team there had been no sense they couldn’t live with the champions and space had been opened in the calendar to focus on the more important competition. But that defeat broke the run.

Nobody could realistically criticise Mikel Arteta for resting players given the slenderness of his squad, but it was as though that was the moment when, having gone