We’re starting to think this Premier League season might just be wild enough to end up being the best ever, and at the absolute core of that is the fact that the answer to one of the key binary questions before a ball was kicked really does look like it might just be ‘Yes’.
And that question is ‘Will Arsenal win the league or will Viktor Gyokeres be a big ol’ flop?’ It didn’t really seem feasible that it could be both of those things, but we’ve now reached the point where it might even be probable.
Arsenal are favourites to win the league still despite their own recent wobble, and Gyokeres is looking floppier by the day.
It cannot be overstated just how at odds that situation is with the accepted wisdom during the long, far-off days of summer.
Back then, there were two main schools of thought. Those who had Gyokeres as the final piece in the Arsenal puzzle; the longed-for Proper Goalscorer whose 25-goal haul would get them over the line in those frustrating games that have dogged them in recent seasons where they’d play three games they ought to win but with no fox in the box carelessly find themselves drawing two and losing one, and suddenly having another mountain to climb as Man City or Liverpool skipped gaily away on the shoulders of their reliable goalscorers.
Then there were the others, mainly from the Tactico camp, who didn’t much care at all for Gyokeres’ underlying numbers and expected him to struggle desperately to replicate his Portuguese form in the tougher Barclays school. Their numbers were swelled further by the always lively pessimist wing of the Arsenal fanbase who just assumed he’d do badly because Arsenal.
The Tacticos are now gleefully claiming a decisive victory in the battle over the Eye-Test Gang while carefully ignoring the travails of their own preferred option for Arsenal at the time, which was Benjamin Sesko.
Anyway. Gyokeres was, in short, set up to be either the final piece in the puzzle or sh*t. Nobody was suggesting he could be both. The sh*ttiest final puzzle piece in football history.
The beauty of Gyokeres as a footballer was that there were multiple things that pointed to a straightforward either/or scenario. That either he would deliver Arsenal the title, or he would flop. Because he is quite a straightforward footballer. When he and the team around him works properly, he scores an awful lot of goals. We have seen this.
But he is not, in any way, a Harry Kane sort of striker with an elite all-round game. He’s not even an Erling Haaland. If there aren’t goals, there really isn’t much else at all. And there have not been many goals, with just one since September in the Premier League.
In all, three of his mere four Premier League goals have come against the promoted sides. And now he isn’t even contributing against teams at that level or lower, having barely touched the ball in a 2-1 win over Wolves that really might be the least impressive Arsenal win in the club’s entire league history.
Yet where are Arsenal? Top of the pile. Only Manchester City, propelled by the Goalbot 3000 himself, have scored more.
There’s an elemental lesson here about the temptation of narratives, if anyone cares to learn it (we certainly don’t), but the fact Arsenal’s long-term, quietly brilliant squad-building has been so successful that the complete flop of the megawatt ‘final piece’ it was universally acknowledged they desperately required has barely made a dent on their chances of success is already emerging as one of the season’s most delicious lines.