Manchester City, Relentless and Ruthless, Strolls Past Arsenal

Reeling in the league leaders after a season-long chase, City won Wednesday and, with less than 10 games left, positioned itself to claim its third straight Premier League title.

Quite when Arsenal knew, for certain, that it was all over is difficult to pinpoint absolutely. There was still faith, presumably, after Manchester City’s first goal, which arrived roughly 370 seconds into a game that had been billed — for weeks — as the Premier League’s great championship showdown.

Some small sliver of optimism might even have endured after John Stones scored the second, delivered on a satellite delay after a video review not long before halftime. The last couple months of a season are a time for intellectual gymnastics and leaps of faith, after all, for the ifs and buts and maybes that soccer grandly calls “permutations.” Maybe a draw would do. Maybe a draw would keep the hope alive.

The third goal, though, was different. After the third, Arsenal’s Rob Holding stood with his hands on his hips, staring off into the middle distance. Gabriel Magalhaes sunk to his haunches, as if contemplating the nature of grass. Thomas Partey started to clap, softly, his reflexes telling him to encourage his teammates. He managed two, lost heart, and stopped.

Converted by Kevin De Bruyne, the third goal had taken whatever wisps of hope that remained for Arsenal and not only extinguished them, but razed their memory from the Earth, and then salted the ground so that they might never arise again. By the time Erling Haaland, hair flowing behind him, made it 4-1, it was hard to believe any hope had ever existed.

Arsenal remains atop the Premier League, of course, 2 points ahead of Manchester City, but having played two more games. The team’s coach, Mikel Arteta, is not prepared to cede anything just yet — “I have been in this country for 22 years,” he said, “and I have seen how quickly things shift” — but that lead now seems like a technicality, the consequence of a fractured timeline, a quirk of scheduling.

There are no guarantees in sports. But common sense and recent experience would suggest that 2 points is not nearly enough to be sustained through the end of the season in late May. Arteta and Arsenal did not just lose to Manchester City on Wednesday night. They were deprived of more than just hope. The wild reverie that this might all end with a first Premier League title in almost 20 years was exposed as an illusion.

The tendency both inside and outside Arsenal will, naturally, be to suggest that Arteta and his team brought this all upon themselves. It would have been different, after all, had they not spent the last three weeks allowing the lead they had accrued over the course of the season to be eroded.

Arsenal led by two goals at Liverpool, and drew. It led by two goals at West Ham, and drew. It gave Southampton, a candidate for relegation, a two-goal head start at the Emirates, mounted a stirring comeback, and drew. At the time in the season when the pressure mounts and the great separate themselves from the merely good, the logic runs, Arsenal was found wanting.