Consistency, Arsène Wenger stressed this week, will be the key to ultimate success in this season's Premier League. Not, however, the kind of consistency his team showed last night in a goalless draw that felt like a significant defeat.
The whistles and jeers of the home fans as the players of Manchester City left the pitch illustrated their distress at having seen their team fail to overcome their rivals as much as a disapproval of the cautious tactics dictated by Roberto Mancini, Wenger's opposite number.
Arsenal's consistency was in their old, worryingly familiar habit of stitching together lovely approach work, all twinkling feet and intricate interplay, without tangible profit. With all his creative players available, Wenger was unable to find the combination capable of piercing City's defensive mesh.
Only Manchester United have the kind of consistency to which Wenger aspires, expressed in an unbeaten run of 20 games since the campaign kicked off. Arsenal are now undefeated in six matches, the first time they have managed more than three in a row this season, but they have lost five, three of those defeats at home.
To start the new year by beating the team lying one place above them in the top three would have been to take a big step on the way to maintaining a challenge for the club's first league title since 2003-04. And to achieve it they needed a continuation of the developing partnership between Cesc Fábregas and Samir Nasri, a continuation of the form that persuaded Wenger to prefer Theo Walcott to Andrey Arshavin for the third time in their past four league matches, and something more from Robin van Persie than the Dutchman has shown this season.
Van Persie's form, for club and country, has been open to question since he returned last April from an ankle injury, suffered in an international friendly in November 2009. As Holland's first-choice striker in South Africa, he proved to be the least effective member of the losing finalists' attack, scoring only one goal, against Cameroon. In 11 appearances for Arsenal this season he has scored only twice: against Partizan in the Champions League last month and against Birmingham City in the 3-0 win at St Andrew's last Saturday, when his side gave the impression that they have finally learnt how to withstand bullying.
That impression, at least, was confirmed last night, particularly in the diligence and alertness with which Jack Wilshere and the greatly improved Alex Song screened their back four. And whenever the ceaselessly ingenious Carlos Tevez managed to create an opening, Johan Djourou and Laurent Koscielny looked equal to the task.
Up front, Van Persie strained to make an impact, turning his old team-mate Kolo Touré on the left-hand side of the area in the ninth minute and smashing his shot against Joe Hart's post. There would be another shot from a similar distance half an hour later, curled into Hart's arms, but probably the striker's most effective contribution of the half came when he headed James Milner's right-wing cross out of his own goalmouth as City tried to counter Arsenal's incessant pressure.
If consistency is indeed the key, then none of Wenger's players has displayed more of it than Fábregas and Nasri, whose combination play can delight the eye. They were at it as early as the second minute, creating the move from which Wilshere produced a low cross which skidded across the empty goalmouth, inches ahead of Van Persie's lunge.
Nasri's emergence this season seems to have been very much to the liking of his captain, and one of the most fascinating prospects of the winter will be to see how they match up against Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta when Arsenal face Barcelona next month. Against City's obdurate three-man midfield, there was no such like-for-like comparison to be made.
If they were to do more than weave effortlessly pretty patterns, however, Arsenal needed a cutting edge, preferably from Van Persie or Walcott. The Englishman could leave Pablo Zabaleta trailing in his slipstream at will, but the right opportunity to make capital was slow in coming, although he showed a greater aptitude for joining in the combination play which is his colleagues' speciality.
Van Persie again proved profligate after the interval, pricking the bubble of expectation by sending a poor shot high and wide in the 49th minute, burying another in the side-netting from a narrow angle six minutes later, thumping a 25-yard drive that forced Hart to leap to his right to turn the ball around the angle on the hour.
A desperate Wenger threw on Arshavin for Walcott and Nicklas Bendtner for Wilshere but the crowd, painfully aware of the night's significance, grew tense and fretful, no longer satisfied with mere inventiveness.
Source: Richard Williams, The Guardian on 6 Jan 11
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