Collapse at Arsenal sums up Chelsea’s deathly, pointless celebrity product

I t lives. It breathes. Those drooping limbs have bloomed with new life. There will be time, also, for the most startling aspect of this late season knockabout at the Emirates, the strange, zombified spectacle currently operating as Chelsea Football Club.

Before that the headlines will rightly be about Arsenal, on a night when their own apparently doomed title push thrust a fist up through the turf and dragged itself back up on to its it feet. A 3-1 win means that Arsenal are now two points clear at the top of the league, albeit having played two matches more than a Manchester City team that seems to win games these days simply by turning up and pointing itself vaguely in the right direction. Arsenal were peppy and busy and full of clever angles for as long as it was necessary to be any of those things, which wasn’t very long at all.

For the home supporters and the manager this game wasn’t really about this season, not completely anyway. The games that remain are more about confirming that this team is real, that the energy and the structures will indeed be there next year, that something of substance has been created, not just a single-season apparition.

Mikel Arteta’s team duly tore into Chelsea. Martin Ødegaard was irresistible in the opening 20 minutes, tucked in between the lines and always in a state of rotation, body angled to the pass, a footballer who was born on the half‑turn.

But beneath this spectacle there was another object of deep fascination here. In the midst of life we are in death. Silence please, for one of the fullest expressions to date of Chelsea’s own complex and at times quite chilling sense of sporting entropy. Everyone knows Chelsea are bad. Defeat here made it six on the reel for Frank