We’re back, baby. Welcome to the content zone. And yes, we did actually go away for a bit. Seriously. Check back. We really did.
In the lead-up to this Premier League opener, Sky Sports had been trailing the fact it will show a total of 1,500 live games this season. Lay these end-to-end and that adds up to about 3,000 hours, or 125 whole days doing nothing but watching football. Chuck in the endless over-gorge of clips, highlights, noises off, VAR rage, furious punditry shemozzles, and that’s pretty much the next eight months spent slumped in your memory foam chair, cramming in those great dripping handfuls of sweet, sweet football-derived product.
For Arsenal’s supporters, on this evidence at least, it might just be a slightly easier experience this time around. They say retaining a title is never easy. Well winning it wasn’t exactly painless either. But how do you manage that altered gravity? On the one hand there’s the Roy Keane approach, performative hunger, serial victory as an act of self-harm. Win the league, stab yourself in the leg, and win it again.
Does hunger matter so much with the game so mechanised, a matter of patterns, systems, processed movements? For Arsenal it is more a case of finding other rhythms and deeper gears. Even before this straightforward 3-0 defeat of Coventry, the goal was clear enough. Win the league, but win it better. Make these games less interesting, or at least less painful.
Well, stage one complete. Two things happened here. First, Arsenal won this game as comfortably as any in the last two seasons. This was like watching a team in demo mode, just trying out the new software, revving the throttle in neutral. And second, Martin Ødegaard played, once again, a little bit more like the half-remembered Martin Ødegaard: 75 minutes, 72 touches, 55 short, clipped little passes. And this is significant.
In the absence of a headline attacking signing, attention has fixed on Ødegaard and the chance he can become himself again after the injury-addled figure of last season. At his best he is just such a constant ferret, a press machine, master of space and of the nudged pass, the look of a thrusting young corporate actuary and the feet of a cage-ball urchin.
Ødegaard’s goal here was the obvious headline moment, Arsenal’s third on 48 minutes. In the moment of execution it felt like a fun and slightly silly thing, the kind of goal Prince Edward might have scored in It’s A Knockout in 1981, set up by Brian Blessed, Emu in goal. But the move to get there was the real deal.
The Norwegian made it in the way he likes to make things, driving the move from just behind the attacking line, twitching the threads. There was a nice delayed pass to Ben White, a drift into space. The finish was comical. Ødegaard sometimes has a strange way of shooting, sidling up to the ball, his foot connecting at an odd angle, a kind of power-stub. Here he miskicked in front of goal, but still sent the ball floating weirdly to the left of Carl Rushworth, who clawed at it helplessly, like a cat flapping its paw at a shadow on the wall.
Ødegaard laughed as he wheeled away. But the celebration was real. This was his first goal at the Emirates since last December. And either side there were signs of something else too, a reawakening of the link-up with Bukayo Saka. Just before half-time they pinged the ball between each other six or seven times, eventually finding space for Declan Rice to shoot just wide. This was like old times. Here they are, the guys, with something between them that is genuinely rare in elite teams: a sense of play, invention, pleasure in the connection.
North London had been agreeably crisp and even a little chilly at kick-off. As a contest, Arsenal-Coventry has Classic Barclays energy: Darren Huckerby running the channels, your TV screen making whooshing noises, Richard Keys with a filthy late-August tan, lemon-yellow blazer sleeves hitched up.
Frank Lampard and Mikel Arteta were up on their feet from the start in identical outfits – black slacks, black knitted mock-turtleneck, white soled black trainers – like the advance party for an executive ninja golf day. And the opening goal on 15 minutes was a high-end three-beat move.
First, Christos Tzolis block-tackled the ball back off Milan van Ewijk by the right touchline, then fed it to Riccardo Calafiori. His pass across the front of the penalty area was pinged hard and low through a narrow arc to Kai Havertz. The finish was luxurious, a first-time left-foot volley so relaxed you half-expected to look down and notice Havertz was playing in a pair of tailored leather parlour slippers.
It was 2-0 soon afterwards, as Coventry found themselves overwhelmed, up against something quicker, slicker and more smoothly geared than many of these players will have ever come up against. This was a good Rice moment, his forward run the catalyst. But it was also an Ødegaard moment, a quick little nudged pass making the space for the shift wide and the killer cross. This is what Ødegaard does best, the pass that makes the pass, the smoothing agent, footballing WD-40.
