Miedema pulls strings from midfield before Chelsea pull out the scissors

Perhaps, on balance, we should have listened to Jonas Eidevall and Emma Hayes when they urged us not to treat this game as a title decider. It was taut, it was tense, it was turbulent and it was stressful in the extreme, particularly in the closing seconds, when either side could have bundled in a late winner. But ultimately, it settled nothing. The most open and least predictable WSL in years still feels as if it will go down to the wire.

Arsenal may have arrived at Kingsmeadow as leaders of the league, but it was arguably they who had more to prove, and they who will be the happier of the two sides. Results had been poor. Performances had been even worse. And so they were fighting for a lot more than three points here.

On a broader level, they’re fighting the same entropy and turbulence that the men’s team have been fighting for 15 years: the sensation that the continent’s genuine elite are pulling clear, that the future power lies elsewhere, and that their best player is just about to move to Barcelona for nothing.

It was in this context that Eidevall made the decision that may well define the rest of Arsenal’s season. Vivianne Miedema, the all-time top scorer in WSL history, started in midfield, with new signing Stina Blackstenius leading the line up front.

It was not even, as many on social media suggested, a pure No 10 role. Although Miedema often played just behind Blackstenius, at other times she was the deepest Arsenal midfielder on the pitch, given the licence to go pretty much where she wanted to get the ball and build attacks.

There are two ways of looking at this, really. On a tactical level, it made plenty of sense. For all her goalscoring achievements in the English game, Miedema has always been at least