The Europa League Final Was Delightfully Shambolic, But I Couldn't Enjoy It
Not as an Arsenal fan.
It was a ghastly cup final, completely devoid of quality in any respect, and it was a lot of fun. It had all the appeal of an encounter you might find near the bottom of the Premier League table, or even farther down the English league pyramid: plenty of head tennis, not many passing patterns or much combination play, lots of high, bouncing long balls, crunching tackles and scrappy scrums and runnin’ ‘round a bit.
Above all, there was a palpable desperation from both sides, and it was delightful. And yet I couldn’t quite enjoy it at all. No matter who won, the aftermath was going to be completely insufferable.
We’re on record around here that Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United have been Spiritually Relegated in the Premier League this season. These are two godawful football teams, and it showed on Wednesday night at the Europa League final in Bilbao. Spurs had one shot on target and only attempted three. They had 27% possession and completed just 187 passes across 98-odd minutes. United put together 512 passes and had the ball at their feet for much of the game, and yet they scarcely did anything at all in Tottenham’s box. Amad Diallo was lively in the first 40 minutes, Bruno Fernandes had a couple of classy touches, but there really was nothing much there.
They threatened when the Spurs defence short-circuited, or when keeper Guglielmo Vicario tried to present them with a chance by — not for the first time this season — flailing and flapping at a high ball. A shambolic mixup in the Spurs penalty area after 67 minutes gifted Rasmus Højlund a glimpse of an open goal, and he looped a header towards the net only for Micky van de Ven to produce a rare moment of genuine quality, at least the athletic kind. He flew across the goal line to smash it away from danger with a scything kick.
If not for his intervention, it would have been a fitting equalizer to a similarly shambolic opening goal.
It is still unclear whether or not Brennan Johnson, who was credited with the winner, actually touched the ball before it trickled into André Onana’s net. It all began with a dangerous, whipping ball in from Pape Sarr out on the left wing, another brief moment of quality, but Luke Shaw’s attempt to deal with it was fairly disastrous. First, he was beaten to the ball by Johnson, who did get a touch at that point. Well, the ball hit his leg as he attempted to strike it on the half volley and bounced away. It rose up, struck Shaw’s arm, and spun off in slow motion towards the bottom corner of the goal. Johnson took another swing at it on the way, but did he even get a stud on?
The Welshman wheeled away and claimed it, much like Spurs will wheel away from the Estadio San Mamés with silverware onboard. It’s their first trophy in 17 years, the instant antidote to so much online and offline BANTER! It’s like they found water in the Sahara. Will this save Ange Postecoglou’s job? Will it erase the nine months of misery just past, a season in which Spurs are cruising for a 17th-place finish in England’s top flight, on course to lose 22 of 38 matches, spared a relegation scrap only by the futile existence of the newly promoted sides?
This will be a supercharged version of Manchester United’s experiment last May after they scored victory over City in the FA Cup final. The groundswell quickly became a tsunami in the fanbase: Erik ten Hag had to stay. This was hilarious to me as an Arsenal fan who’s seen some poor sides win FA Cups that said nothing about their ability to compete for the league, and it ultimately spelled disaster for United — a rolling disaster that continued inexorably into Bilbao.
But Spurs did have quite a few injuries this season, and this cup ain’t the FA Cup. It gets them into the Champions League. That may be enough to lure some decent players, which they surely need, because injuries were not their only problem this season. Arsenal justifiably caught pelters for the club’s failure to sign a striker, but both of the starting center forwards on Wednesday night were proof that sometimes, signing somebody is worse. Richarlison and the aforementioned Brennan Johnson are not Champions League forwards, the Tottenham midfield is limited, the defence is easily exposed, and the keeper has no command of his 18-yard box. And yet, with the right moves this summer, it could all be very different.
At the very least, the BANTER! will be intolerable. This will be a re-run of last summer, when United fans insisted they’d had a better campaign than Arsenal’s because they’d won a trophy, but it will be harder to dismiss. Arsenal’s European record is quite poor. It is five years since they’ve won a trophy now, despite — unlike the two teams here — competing for the big ones. This game is ultimately about winning tournaments and leagues, because, as fans of any terrible team that salvaged its season with a trophy love to say, nobody remembers the circumstances 30 years from now. They don’t remember the runners-up, or that the winners had one shot on goal before packing it in for 55 minutes. They just see the name carved into metal.
And that is why, after a whole season of tuning in specifically to watch these two teams faceplant, I could not enjoy this double planting-of-the-face. Because at the end, somebody was going to win and shove it in my face all summer. I can point out that Spurs have been Spiritually Relegated all I want, but they’ll be playing in all the same competitions Arsenal will be next season, and they’ll have a strangely pebbled hunk of silver in the cabinet next to that Audi Cup, and the League Cup that dates back to when Lamine Yamal was seven months old.
These two clubs in Bilbao were like drowning swimmers grasping desperately for the shore, but now Tottenham will say they won the triathlon. Eventually, we’ll all get tired of arguing.
The main comfort here is that everyone in and around Manchester United is more miserable than ever, and they have almost nothing to look forward to. This almost makes up for everything Patrice Evra’s said about Arsenal over the years. It’s not just that they’re a miserably poor side. They don’t seem to have much money to change that — United! Impoverished! — and head coach Ruben Amorim has a lot to prove. How the hell did Kobbie Mainoo stay on the bench until the final minute of the 90? You may be able to tell by now that this whole situation became so dire, I was forced to silently support Manchester United.
Maybe Tottenham’s visions of trophyful glory will fade in the coming weeks, and the reality will dawn that they are not very good. I doubt it will matter, not in the binary world of modern football fandom where you either got a trophy or you BOTTLED IT! and a frightening number of people seem to consume the game through Instagram posts comparing various players’ “G/A.” So, I guess I’ll just have to grin and bear it, and remember that I’d never trade Arsenal’s season for Tottenham’s, and hope that Chelsea BOTTLE IT! against Real Betis next week.⚽︎