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David Raya Is Papering Over a Structural Crack
Enzo Le Fee stepped up at the Stadium of Light with the away end already bracing, the way you brace
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David Raya Is Papering Over a Structural Crack
Enzo Le Fee stepped up at the Stadium of Light with the away end already bracing, the way you brace when you know exactly how this goes if it goes...
The Unbeaten Season Was Never About the Numbers
The penalty was never really in doubt, not for the eighty-nine minutes before it. Ruud van Nistelrooy placed the ball
Read Article →Arteta's Rotation Talk Doesn't Match His Team Sheets
Arsenal were 3-1 up at the Emirates against Tottenham, deep into the kind of afternoon a manager dreams about handing
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Invincibles
14 September 2026
The Unbeaten Season Was Never About the Numbers
The penalty was never really in doubt, not for the eighty-nine minutes before it. Ruud van Nistelrooy placed the ball on the spot at Old Trafford in the closing minutes of a goalless afternoon in September 2003, six matches into Arsenal's title defence, with Jens Lehmann rocking on
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Arteta
13 September 2026
Arteta's Rotation Talk Doesn't Match His Team Sheets
Arsenal were 3-1 up at the Emirates against Tottenham, deep into the kind of afternoon a manager dreams about handing to his fringe players, and Mikel Arteta made four substitutions all season could have used as evidence for restraint rather than reform. Four changes, from a position of total control,
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Champions League
12 September 2026
Arsenal Keep Reaching Finals and Keep Losing Them
Emirates Stadium, Wednesday 9 September 2026. Napoli sat deep and organised for eighty-odd minutes and gave up nothing until they gave up the one thing that mattered, and Martin Odegaard put it away to make it 1-0. The post-match language called it impressive. It was, and it also told you
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11 September 2026
Gyökeres Needs a Job Description, Not a Skill Set
On the last Sunday of July, at the Emirates, Viktor Gyökeres scored a second-half penalty in a game Arsenal lost 3-2 to Borussia Dortmund. It was the Emirates Cup, a friendly, the sort of fixture that means nothing and gets reported as though it might mean everything. Afterwards he said
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10 September 2026
Ødegaard's Strike Answers a Question Nobody Had Settled
The clock had gone past the eighty-minute mark at the Maradona when Martin Ødegaard did the thing Arsenal's away record in Italy insisted he couldn't do — took it on the half-turn outside the box, in a stadium where this club had scored once in five previous
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Arteta
9 September 2026
Arteta's Calm About the Forward Line Is the Tell
Back in May, standing in the wreckage of a Champions League final lost on penalties to PSG, Mikel Arteta told anyone who'd listen that the summer needed three things: Arsenal had to be "very, very ambitious, very fast and very smart." It was the kind of
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Arteta
8 September 2026
The Unbeaten Talk Inverts Everything Wenger Got Right
Sunday afternoon, the final whistle goes at 2-1 over Chelsea, and the number on the scoreboard says one thing while the last twenty minutes said another. Arsenal spent that stretch defending a lead rather than defending a plan, ceding the ball in patches that would have made Arteta wince on
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8 September 2026
Arsenal's Back Three Is a Confession, Not a Gimmick
The habit at the Emirates this season is to watch the fullback tuck inside on goal kicks and wait for the shape to declare itself — back three when Arsenal have it, back five when they don't, and a wing-back doing the running of two men in between. It
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Wenger
7 September 2026
Wenger Survived Two Februaries Before He Won Anything
By the second week of February 1998, Arsenal sat twelve points behind Manchester United at the top of the table, and the back pages had started dusting off a joke that was by then eighteen months old. Arsène Who? had been funny in September 1996, when nobody outside French football
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