The Lower Eastern Times Opening The Third Eye
Related Articles
By:Vincent Mumba
For context, I’m 24 years old. I have supported Arsenal my entire life, and I’ve never seen us lift a Premier League title. Not once. I was two years old, in diapers, the last time Arsenal won the Premier League. My memories are hand-me-down stories, grainy highlights, and older fans telling me how it used to feel inevitable. And after Sunday’s display, the waiting feels endless.
Here’s the truth: Arsenal feels like an emotional fraud of a football club right now. Not because we’re bottom-table or hopeless, but because we keep cosplaying as contenders while lacking the instinct that actually wins things. The most exhausting part isn’t even the team; it’s us, the fans, who keep insisting everything is fine, that “the process” is working, that patience is somehow a virtue when the same failures repeat themselves at the same moments. Oh, we played well… where are the points then? I don’t remember points given for playing well.
This season especially has exposed it. The so-called top teams have been poor by their own standards. City has dropped points they never used to. Liverpool has stuttered. United is a mess. In that vacuum, Arsenal looked dangerous not because we rose, but because everyone else fell. And people mistake that for some sort of mastery.
Let’s stop pretending the last two seasons were heroic near-misses. When the pressure arrived, when control mattered more than pretty build-up and set pieces, we folded. Not once. Repeatedly. Focus went missing. Composure evaporated. You don’t accidentally lose league-deciding games… You reveal what you are. Pathetic excuse of a top-flight club!
Even now, look at the run-in. Apart from the United match, which should never have been a loss at the Emirates under any serious title-chasing side, how many games did we draw because we refused to kill them off early? How many times did we dominate possession and still look harmless? That isn’t bad luck. That’s a lack of cruelty.
And that’s the core problem! Arsenal are not ruthless. We are not feared. We are not a team that steps on throats early and walks away. We let teams breathe. We let crowds come alive. We let belief return. Title winners don’t do that.
So no, even if by some strange alignment of incompetence elsewhere we stumble into a Premier League title, I won’t feel proud. It would feel conditional, borrowed, and dependent. Trophies are supposed to feel inevitable when you win them, earned, not granted because others collapsed harder.
As for Arteta, this is the uncomfortable part Arsenal fans avoid. If you cannot deliver a Premier League or a Champions League with this level of backing, time, and control, then you’ve reached your ceiling. Simple. If Madrid truly wanted him, he should go. Let him test his ideas where standards are unforgiving, and excuses expire quickly.
At this stage of the season, games should be settled early. Authority should be asserted. Instead, we look tense, cautious, and almost scared of our own expectations. That fear trickles from the touchline into the pitch.
When the time comes, it shouldn’t just be the manager. This squad, for all its technical polish, has shown again and again that it doesn’t have the stomach for domination. Clearing house will hurt, but pretending continuity alone will transform mentality is pure delusion.
Losing to United at home isn’t just a bad result. It’s symbolic. It’s a reminder that Arsenal still crumble when pride is demanded and not just points. Until this club learns how to close, to hurt teams, to kill games instead of teasing them, Arsenal will remain exactly what they are now: impressive in theory, irrelevant when it counts.
Vincent Mumba is a sports journalist, writer, and Journalism student at Mount Kenya University. Email at Vincentmumba25@mail.com
