Edouard Mendy didn’t see it coming. As the ball looped over his right shoulder and thudded a post on its way in, his teenage antagonist was already turning away with a devilish glint. Bukayo Saka had just put Arsenal 3-0 up against Chelsea on Boxing Day 2020, en route to three Premier League points that could hardly have been more welcome had they been slapped on the table by Santa Claus himself.
That week, West Brom boss Sam Allardyce had fired an irresistible dig at the Gunners by suggesting they were relegation rivals for his doomed Baggies, following a miserable run that left the north Londoners 15th – their worst start to a season since 1974-75. A year into his tenure as manager, Mikel Arteta needed drastic action.
Up to that point, Saka, Emile Smith Rowe and Gabriel Martinelli had only ever started one Premier League match together: a tepid 0-0 draw against Everton under caretaker manager Freddie Ljungberg one year earlier, which did little to stir the senses. But this was different. Back came Smith Rowe for only his second league start, Martinelli for his seventh, in a changing of the guard that felt like something. Together, the three youngest starters on the pitch did Arteta proud in an unlikely battering of the Blues, dazzling an eerie COVID-closed Emirates Stadium. Seven days later, Smith Rowe and Saka combined in a whir of youthful limbs as Arsenal won 4-0 for their third successive win in a week. The opposition manager could only lament another game where his team “learned an awful lot about what we can and cannot do”. Life came at Sam Allardyce fast.
Arsenal didn’t know it, but they were offering signs of things to come – if not definitive proof at that point, then at least the first green shoots of growth. Fourteen months later, as Arteta’s revamped side muscled their way into a 3-1 advantage at Vicarage Road in March, Saka, Martinelli and 23-year-old old-timer Martin Odegaard were running riot as the Gunners snatched fourth place from Manchester United.
Now, with the Premier League’s youngest team, Champions League football is in their sights for the first time since 2016-17. It’s taken humiliation, painful exits, boardroom upheaval and battered egos to make it this far, but finally bedraggled Gooners have that uneasiest of feelings: hope…
ARSENE: THE END
January 22, 2016. Unless you’re nudgewinking towards the opening weekend of the 2020-21 campaign, then this was the last time Arsenal led the table at the end of a Premier League matchday. It’s not easy to
