Here they go again. Few teams do heroic failure quite like Arsenal. They can win while exiting competitions, departing with a sense of frustration at what might have been while offering the promise of what could be.
They are a side who win the majority of their games but possess the fragility to suggest they could lose any. They are a futuristic team but history repeats itself. The difference this season is that the sense of deja vu may arrive sooner.
They tend to bow out of the Uefa Champions League in the last 16. Their ejection could be rubber-stamped tonight, even if that might require Olympiakos achieving the unlikely and procuring a point away at Bayern Munich. More probable is the scenario whereby Pep Guardiola's team defeat the Greek champions, Arsene Wenger's side beat Dynamo Zagreb and go to Piraeus in two weeks, needing to win by two goals and triumphing by one.
It would be quintessentially Arsenal. It would bring back memories of ultimately irrelevant second-leg wins against AC Milan, Bayern and Monaco, none of which were quite enough to secure progress. It is typical Arsenal, too, that they enter a defining fixture with a depleted cast.
“We have been hit very bad in November,” Wenger said. He is without seven injured players, all able to occupy midfield berths. His fondness for attacking midfielders has created an unbalanced squad, but selection is sometimes simplified by the reality that they are never all available at the same time. At least Aaron Ramsey’s return could end the strange situation where the contenders for the spare midfield berth are left-back Kieran Gibbs and Joel Campbell, a striker by preference.
Yet there is a greater problem and a more predictable one. Francis Coquelin was catapulted into the status of an indispensable, partly by his own excellence but partly by Arsenal's negligence in the transfer window. Yet no alternative defensive midfielder was signed and Coquelin sustained a knee injury in Saturday's 2-1 defeat to West Bromwich Albion. He will not play again until 2016.
“Coquelin is out for at least two months,” Wenger said. “We have had so many bad surprises on the scans, so I don’t want to speculate more.” The slow Mikel Arteta, who lacks the muscle to protect the defence, represents an inadequate deputy but he, too, was hurt at The Hawthorns. He will return sooner, but Arsenal are still short-staffed in a pivotal position.
“I will do what is needed in January knowing that it is not an ideal market,” Wenger said. In any case, he has six weeks to negotiate before then. “We have in the squad players who can compensate,” he added.
It is both a strength and a weakness that he looks for answers internally but, until the transfer window opens, he has to anyway.
Mathieu Flamini, the third in line for the holding midfielder’s role, is set to face Dynamo tonight.
A fringe figure represents a good omen in one respect. He scored a 90th-minute winner on the Croatian champions’ last visit. It was back in 2006, but it was another example of Arsenal’s brinkmanship.
Their mercurial nature is summed up by the fact that their sole Champions League win this season was against Bayern. But rather than positioning them to qualify, it merely ensured the group is still alive.
Their failings in the first two fixtures may condemn them to a Europa League place. It is telling, and damning, that Dynamo’s sole victory in their past 19 Champions League group games came against Arsenal.
They are the group’s least impressive side and, damaging as the home defeat to Olympiakos was, it was arguably worse to lose in Croatia in September. “We should have got a better result,” Wenger said of September’s 2-1 loss in Croatia.
It is an understatement. That underachievement could come at a considerable cost. For the first time since 1999, Arsenal could be turfed out of the Champions League before Christmas.
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