This Week in Fandom: The Exorcism.

Ousmane Dembélé strikes again.

Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the Knicks, Yanks, 49ersRaiders, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.

After a fruitful excursion towards a comic book store named Walt’s, I hauled ass in the opposite direction towards a beer garden a short walk from Görlitzer Park – to hope there was in fact a God, and that He understood the great threat posed to humanity by Champions League triumph for the Arsenal.

I’d been there once before. It’s in the middle of another park, I am not very good with names, and was almost overrun by bats the last time I patronised the place. This was not nearly as bad – yes, yes, sometimes the segue-ways write themselves – as Jockel being overrun by far too many Arsenal fans. It was not a sea of red, not quite; but there was enough of an infestation to give me a short bout of claustrophobia. I told my companions that I’d grab a bite to eat and a beverage, and I’d navigate a tight squeeze (eventually) towards the folding chair those darlings had saved me. I counted four screens; maybe three-hundred people or thereabouts.

I ate a crispy serving of currywurst mit pommes in line for a Rädler, a beer you pacify with a lemonade or a Sprite, and hadn’t even sat down before Kai Havertz blasted Arsenal into an early lead. I thought about leaving immediately, and I made sure to warn my colleagues at various junctures that if things went tits up I would simply leave immediately.

Suddenly there are Arsenal fans everywhere – women, children, even dogs with no choice in the matter in retro Bergkamp merch, overwhelming my beloved London. At the weekend there were idiots having it large in the direction of elderly Spurs fans on the Tube, because this insufferable species would rather count receipts than revel in their own moment. But this isn’t why we’re here. I have no use for propaganda, no right even to circulate any. I’d made peace, early, with what could have been on Saturday evening – and I thanked Jesus Christ, who does not hear from me so much, for the second time in two weeks.

The narrative about what this means or doesn’t mean for the Arsenal, for football, is a fascinating one – and a difficult one to wade into without a flag. But I am mastering the art of objectivity, my dear boy.

I just sent Tai, a Gooner of note, a voice-note guesstimating Arsenal’s attempt to win with defense is a matter more for philosophical analysis than tactical. What is it in our hearts and souls, and not so much minds, we expect football to be? Three different actors need to answer this question: Mikel Arteta, football fans as honestly as possible, and the football multimedia industry.

Even my dependables at TiFo, wholly absorbed for years now by The Athletic, want us all to cut Arsenal some slack. If you can play defensive football for 120 minutes, against this PSG side, surely you’ve landed upon something. Losing on penalties is just what it’s always been: bad luck.

This is not, I don’t believe, the broad overview I’d like to take away in a season that produced that classic between Munich and Paris, or from a generation of play that more often than not has rewarded front-foot football. You and I briefly explored the great defensive sides of the last 25 years … The Atleti side that was summarily punished, in a Champions League final, by a multi-pronged onslaught from Real Madrid’s short-lived BBC (Bale-Benzema-Cristiano) initiative. Jose Mourinho, for eventually God hears the prayers of minnows, was banished to the commentary desk for trading his soul to Satan. What success defensive sides have enjoyed is not tactically in question – it comes down to whether you, a fan, respects it. Have you actually enjoyed the process of watching a football team say fuck the aesthetics: we’re going to park our bus on the flowery lawn of free-flowing football, and then hide our means in the middle pages of history.

I fled the scene Saturday, red triumph or no, thinking tactically Arsenal got exactly what they deserved. They spent an entire season building a machine without a concrete offensive identity, managed to get away with it in a league rife with hangovers (Liverpool from an unlikely title grab, Spurs from Europa glory, and who knows what drugs Chelsea were on), until they met an attacking force so dynamic that it required them to dig a little deeper than usual. Amateur eyes presume Arsenal lost that game in the penalty shootout, and this is woefully incorrect – they lost it when a lapse in concentration, caused by endless and irresistible proposals of offensive chaos, allowed PSG to claim and convert a spot kick.

I clenched very tightly when the Arsenal made a slight go of it all shortly after the 1-hour mark. They sent the ball wide a couple times to Saka, who it has to be said has roughly 2.5 moves with which to beat his man. Noni Madueke looked about as venomous as usual but his end product lacks that certain something still, and the opposing box lacked a pure goal threat from the Gooners. I remember watching Viktor Gyökeres posture twice or thrice around his marker, like a man in his early 40s trying to scare off a wild animal, because Arteta’s geography leaves good poachers stranded on the Isle of False 9. This team, despite a net spend of almost a billion pounds sterling in Arteta’s 7-year reign, simply never possessed the facilities.

I got to see a Jose Mourinho side up close when he almost ran Tottenham Hotspur into the ground. He probably wondered, any time Arsenal dispossessed or blocked Paris, where the shiv was hidden. The warm jets never came on, because they simply weren’t there.