Arteta’s road to redemption marked out in Newcastle black and white

T here was a very strange moment for Arsenal just after the hour against Chelsea at the Emirates on Tuesday night, when those in red appeared intent on giving their opponents a helping hand, when it felt as though we were watching a computer game glitch.

Chelsea broke with four on two, a posse of additional Arsenal players straining to get back, only for N’Golo Kanté to make a poor attempt at the killer pass. No matter. The ball ricocheted off a couple of Arsenal players, nobody able to take charge of the situation and there was Noni Madueke, the Chelsea winger, close to the byline.

Madueke pulled back but none of his teammates had made a run. At which point it looked as though Arsenal were about to contrive between them to knock it into their own net. The control was still absent, slapstick the theme, before they did eventually clear.

The home fans were bemused. Their team were 3-0 up and it ought to have been four or five. But then Arsenal did concede, Madueke getting on to a pass in behind Oleksandr Zinchenko and the rest of the match was not as comfortable as it should have been. It was perhaps just as well that Chelsea are at such a low ebb. Had they scored again, it might have got interesting.

Game management, the pros call it, and Mikel Arteta said afterwards that Arsenal had managed the last 30 minutes badly. They got away with it. But they had not done in two of their previous games – the 2-2 draws at Liverpool and West Ham; they had been 2-0 up in each. After that came the chaotic 3-3 home draw with Southampton and the 4-1 drubbing at Manchester City, leading up to Chelsea.

Everybody knows what the layperson calls it and it is a notion fuelled by the club’s misadventures of previous seasons, most recently