After the three month shut down of football in England because of the coronavirus outbreak, Arsenal had re-started their season with two defeats. However in the third match on this day they finally gained a win – 0-2 away to Southampton. This was the start of an 11 match run in which Arsenal won 8, drew 1 and lost 2. In a reversal of earlier form, Arsenal were unbeaten at home in this run.
But what was ignored by commentators generally was that this run was a continuation of a trend which had begun after Christmas Day and ran for the last two thirds of the season.
Across the final 24 games of the campaign Arsenal had the second best record of any club in the league winning 14, drawing five and losing five, thus notching up 47 points.
That was of course still a long way behind Manchester City but it was, across those 24 games, two points more than Manchester United got, five more than Chelsea, nine more than Liverpool and ten more than Tottenham.
Because the media refused to acknowledge this dramatic turn around in form, it continued to put forward the notion that Arsenal had had the most dreadful of seasons, highlighting of course the fact that in the following campaign Arsenal would not be in Europe for the first time in 25 years.
In doing so the media conveniently forgot to mention that all the other “top six” clubs had had prolonged periods outside of the European places, and for Arsenal this was the first time without a European place since before Mr Wenger took over.