Bayern Munich’s record so far this season reads like someone playing a computer game who keeps restarting every time they lose.
In 12 matches, Pep Guardiola’s team has accrued 12 wins and 40 goals, conceding five surely only as a half-hearted gesture towards trying to keep things “realistic.” As far as notional title rivals go, Wolfsburg and Borussia Dortmund have both been dismissed by the same 5-1 scoreline. As far as everyone else goes, it’s been pretty much the same story. Hence the brevity.
Quite clearly, what’s required for Bayern is a challenge, and it’s into this context that Arsenal enters Tuesday’s UEFA Champions League tilt. Sorry Arsenal, but it’s fallen to you.
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Now very obviously this isn’t ideal. No one’s saying that. In complete contrast to Bayern, Arsenal has lost both of its Champions League games so far this season, against two of the more unfashionable teams in the competition, Dinamo Zagreb and Olympiacos, with both games containing an air of shambles about them. There was Olivier Giroud’s sending off in the first game, then there was a goalkeeping error from a dubiously-included number two goalkeeper in the second game.
As if that wasn’t enough, for anyone who has any kind of memory for these kinds of things, it’s pretty easy to recount that Bayern has also already repeatedly knocked Arsenal out of this competition in the recent past. So no one’s betting any mortgages on any Arsenal wins.
And yet desperate times call for desperate measures. Arsenal will have to “do” if Bayern is to experience a real challenge any time soon, because who else is there until the later stages of the Champions League all the way into next year? Once you have the implied answer to that rhetorical question, the only positive to take is that at least a case can be built that Arsenal does have the potential to unlock that rarest of things—a competitive Bayern game—even if it is not by any means a certainty. There is at least a possibility of a challenge, even if by no means the guarantee of anything more than that.
The Arsenal case would be founded most generously on the idea that Arsenal always responds to a crisis. Very often in recent seasons it has become a source of annoyance after the event that Arsene Wenger’s teams seem incapable of building from a strong position; rather they tend to look happiest when recovering from a weak one. On Tuesday, however, that won’t be an annoyance; it’ll be essential. One big hope for Arsenal this week is that it can respond to the huge, crisis-inducing defeats to Dinamo Zagreb and Olympiacos and beat Bayern simply because that’s what Arsenal tends to do. Muscle memory isn’t the best place to start a convincing argument in a team’s favour, but it is—whatever anyone says—technically a place to start an argument of some kind.
Rest assured, though, the other big hope for Arsenal here—and the neutral chasing a competitive Bayern game—is more factual. More tangible. Less desperate. It’s a simple and yet intriguing prospect, rare and therefore beautiful. It’s this: Arsenal is, itself, somehow playing really, really well right now, with its position at the bottom of Bayern’s group more a residual effect of earlier poor form than a reflection of the state of this team in this current moment.
After a stunted start to the season, Alexis Sanchez has gone full Alexis Sanchez, with 10 goals in six games for Arsenal and Chile, Mesut Ozil has reanimated with four assists and a goal in his last three Arsenal games and Petr Cech has taken on the air of a goalkeeper who really finds it difficult to conceive of the idea of the ball going past him at some point. These are proper players, playing somewhat properly. Add in a fit-again Laurent Koscielny and you start to remember what you thought Arsenal might look like this season before West Ham United took it apart on the opening day and temporarily ruined the whole vibe.
For once, there are no really painful weak links. Up front, the regular Walcott-Giroud switcharoo seems to have worked itself out into a gentle back and forth whereby whoever is on the pitch looks a goal-scoring threat and a useful team player, rather than the brief arrangement of a few games ago where whoever was on the pitch looked slightly confused about the whole thing and a little awkward. In midfield, Santi Cazorla, Ozil, Sanchez and Aaron Ramsey have followed Manchester City and started to rotate in perfect, destructive harmony ahead of Francis Coquelin. In defence, well, it’s still not perfect, but again I return to Cech’s decisive presence in goal.
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As a whole, perhaps the last time an Arsenal team played “Wengerball” as well as this one has for the last three or so games was in 2011, when one was inspired by Cesc Fabregas and Jack Wilshere into beating Barcelona—another Guardiola team, if you’ll remember. And the results have reflected the play: two classy 3-0 wins have arrived in consecutive games against two difficult teams and suddenly out of nowhere Arsenal is playing like it can beat anyone.
Now don’t get me wrong, of course confident wins against the newly functional Manchester United and the streetwise Watford might still not be great credentials for beating Bayern Munich—particularly with Robert Lewandowski and Thomas Muller on the form they are. But, if you read this carefully worded article through once again, that is not what this writer proposed. I said a case could be made that Arsenal is capable of giving Bayern a “challenge” this Tuesday, and I think there’s enough evidence there for that.
Guardiola’s team might well still win, but if Arsenal is the team it’s been showing of late it definitely won’t be 5-1, and it just might be a bit of a challenge. At some point, Guardiola might even have to consider pushing the restart button.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter