Arsenal 2 WBA 0; 8 December 2012
The score in relation to this match looks bland. So why bother with it?
Yet to me this game is the symbol of all the turmoil of the 2012/13 season and the start of our way out of it.
On 17 November 2012 Arsenal beat Tottenham 5-2, after only one win in the previous four games (a 1-0 defeat of QPR). Suddenly there was some light at the end of the tunnel.
But then we had a 0-0 draw with Aston Villa on 24 November, and a 1-1 away draw with Everton on 28 November. And “false dawn” was exactly what the Tottenham result seemed to be when we then lost at home to Swansea.
This was getting awful – and it was the moment when the Anti-Wengerians must have felt their time had come.
The league table looked like this after the Swansea game…
| Pd | W | D | L | F | A | G.D | Pts | |||
| 1 | Manchester United | 15 | 12 | 0 | 3 | 37 | 21 | +16 | 36 | |
| 2 | Manchester City | 15 | 9 | 6 | 0 | 28 | 11 | +17 | 33 | |
| 3 | Chelsea | 15 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 25 | 16 | +9 | 26 | |
| 4 | Tottenham Hotspur | 15 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 28 | 23 | +5 | 26 | |
| 5 | West Bromwich Albion | 15 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 24 | 19 | +5 | 26 | |
| 6 | Everton | 15 | 5 | 8 | 2 | 25 | 19 | +6 | 23 | |
| 7 | Swansea City | 15 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 23 | 17 | +6 | 23 | |
| 8 | West Ham United | 15 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 19 | 17 | +2 | 22 | |
| 9 | Stoke City | 15 | 5 | 7 | 3 | 14 | 12 | +2 | 22 | |
| 10 | Arsenal | 15 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 24 | 16 | +8 | 21 |
Passable for quite a bit of the Graham reign, and a lot better than Mee’s latter years, but still not what the Emirates crowd had got used to. Beating Tottenham 5-2 seemed centuries away and irrelevant when the team was behind Stoke City and West Ham. Tottenham must have thought they stood a real chance of fourth.
The gap was five points – which in one sense doesn’t seem much – except that although one might expect Stoke to lose a couple and Arsenal to win a couple – we needed to do better than all six teams above us. It seemed unlikely.
But then something happened and it started by beating West Brom on this day. After that we beat Reading 2-5, Wigan 0-1 and Newcastle 7-3. The defeats were not over – we still had a defeat to Chelsea and Tottenham to come, but the amazing momentum that took Arsenal through the rest of that season, ending up with Arsenal in fourth, started with the West Brom game.
After 15 games, and just before the WBA game, we were 10th and this looked to be the season when we would finally drop out of the Champions League. After that we played 23 more league games, won 16, drew 3 and lost 4 – ending up in fourth position, claimed on the last day of the season.