Nerves were meant to afflict Arsenal, but Manchester City lack that energy | Premier League

Is it still on? Are we still fighting for this title? Do they have to go to West Ham and get something?

Or perhaps this really was the day the music died, a game where Manchester City had 24 attempts at goal without looking like they seriously believed any of them would go in, always going forward, but without any real sense of edge.

You might say this was a very now, very current form of Manchester City dominance. Endless charges. No clear outcome at the end.

“I’m always positive,” was Pep Guardiola’s verdict at a post-match press conference where he definitely said a lot of stuff. From “these players deserve a monument to the way they played”, to more chat about how hard it is to get to London, to the observation “Madrid are more dangerous than West Ham”, to a very honest digression on the toothlessness of his own attack.

The numbers are now beginning to narrow. Arsenal have seven games to go. City are nine points behind. Win the game in hand. Win the head-to-head at the Etihad. Get it to just three points. It could still happen. And even in the final moments of a quietly frantic 1-1 draw, this didn’t exactly feel like the end of a title race. But then for long periods it didn’t feel like anything, more like an absence of feeling, cold spectacle, another note in the dawning of our exciting new robot overworld.

The London Stadium on a Saturday night has that tinny corporate event feel, just another ticketed mega-hanger, one down from the O₂, swirling with spotlights, those dystopian hellscape-style Olympic towers peering in above the lip of the stand. As kick-off approached a large tifo banner with a message at the bottom was unfurled, although no one will ever know what that message was because it remained concealed within the folds, before the whole thing was finally scrunched away like a damp sheet of newspaper. This was a tifo that said: “We don’t really care about tifo.” Or in other words, the best kind of tifo.

Arsenal’s late win against Everton had sharpened the edge around this game, and around the two remaining mega-stories of the season. First, the destination of the Premier League title. And second the big one, a narrative that has gripped the nation, source already of mocked-up newspaper pullouts and city-centre parade planning. Namely: can Spurs get themselves relegated? This is one of the knock-on effects of this game. A 1-1 draw with a point for West Ham looks bad for Spurs. OK, it looks extra bad for Spurs. If you’re Spurs right now the one consolation is things can only get better. So how do they just keep getting worse?

Nine minutes into this game City had 93% possession. West Ham had made three passes. The black shapes moved laterally. The claret and white shapes ran their reactive patterns. It didn’t really feel like football at that point, more like some kind of mass public leisure product being staged, or an art installation successfully conveying the basic meaninglessness of all modern life. From here perhaps it can be moved to an Abu Dhabi conference hall, or the lobby of a California tech monolith.

The two first-half goals were surprising for different reasons. Bernardo Silva had touched the ball more than anyone else, 44 times, in the opening 30 minutes. His 45th was a beautifully mishit skew over the head of Mads Hermansen and into the back of the net. It wasn’t a shot. Given where he was aiming, it wasn’t even really on target. But it was City’s first shot on target.

Three minutes later West Ham scored from what would end up being their only effort on target, a header direct from a corner. Gianluigi Donnarumma flapped and missed. Konstantinos Mavropanos headed it in off the bar with a flex of his huge, square-jawed, beamingly handsome head. Mavropanos had never scored for West Ham in this stadium before. His last home club goal for anyone was for Stuttgart in November 2022.

City showed more urgency in the second half. Erling Haaland made a lot of runs. For a while he seemed to be playing with his own personal plastic petrol station ball, swirling around all over the place, impossible to trap. Haaland has four goals in 18 games since Christmas. There are suggestions that tweaks to the system haven’t suited him. Antoine Semenyo has been getting into the same spaces, although here he played as an enthusiastically blunt No 10.

The final minutes were frantic. West Ham defended with heart and skill. At the death Marc Guéhi lifted a shot over the bar from six yards, and that was pretty much that. City’s players collapsed on to the turf at the final whistle. They weren’t beaten, but they looked it in that moment.

City have clearly drifted a bit, dropping leads and points to Nottingham Forest, West Ham and Spurs in the last six weeks. It isn’t a lack of talent or manpower or coaching ability. But this can be a strange-looking mix of players at times, an entity that seems always trying to create a sense of itself, to make up who it’s going to be.

Here’s a novel idea. Maybe the thing that was supposed to kill Arsenal in this title race is also the thing that has become their key point of difference. Nervous energy is still energy. An edgy, fretful team is still a team.

The thing that really gets you these days, and which will kill this sport if we keep hammering away at it, is entropy, a lack of feeling, a loss of identity. Arsenal may not be free-flowing and imperious, but they always generate urgency, always play every second as though it matters.

This is the thing Tottenham don’t have, the thing West Ham had here, and the thing Arsenal have too, for all the trapped energy, the sense at times of playing football through a full-body clingfilm wrap. Always feeling like an actual team, a collective, a singly unit, even in the bad moments. Maybe this is the final frontier, and the story of Arsenal’s season to this point.