Why Arsenal winning this Community Shield REALLY matters…

What do you do when you’ve won the Treble?

How do you motivate yourself to set yourself apart from the other Manchester team that has won the Treble?

How do you step outside the shadow of the Premier League’s greatest team – Arsenal’s Invincibles – and their unrivaled accomplishment of going unbeaten for an entire season?

You win the Quadruple. That’s what.

Win four out of the five trophies available to a Premier League team: the League, the Champions League, the F.A. Cup,  the League Cup and the Community Shield (which, let’s face it, should be called the Super Cup, as it is in other countries.)

The easiest of these trophies would obviously be the Community Shield, since it is only competed for by two teams: the League Winners and FA Cup Winners (or League runners-up, if the League and FA Cups are won by the same team, as happened this year.)

Sure – Arsenal beating City in the Community Shield is meaningful to the Gunners for a number of other reasons:

• Beating Pep’s City and ending the long run of LLLL’s since knocking City out of the FA Cup in 2020
• Starting the season with silverware will only inject positivity into this young team, and will validate the transfer decisions made by our new signings – all of whom gave solid performances at Wembley, and have now experienced the joy of winning in Arsenal red and white.
• Extending Arteta’s unbeaten run at Wembley: 12 games unbeaten now, as player and manager.
• With this win, Arsenal overtake Liverpool in all-time Community Shield wins, with 17.
  Only United have won more since 1908, with 21.
  Arsenal have now won 5 of the last 10.
  In the Premier League era, United are ahead with 11 victories to Arsenal’s 9 – although Arsenal have won it three times since United last won it in 2016/17.
  Arsenal’s head-to-head record with United is W3, L1. The loss was by penalty shoot-out.
• Spurs haven’t lifted the Shield in the Premier League era, and are unlikely to. Ever.

In a desperate and illogical attempt to put a positive spin on his loss, the best Pep could come up with was:

We lost three times in a row? Do you know why? We won three Premier Leagues!

This is the same Guardiola who insisted, in April 2019:

Of course in Spain, in Germany, where I have been, the Super Cup is an important trophy …the Community Shield, is a Super Cup in the rest of Europe, in the world. That is what it is.

Arteta, however, was happy to admit that he enjoys winning, saying:

It feels great. I don’t think it gets much better than winning a trophy at Wembley against the best team in the world, doing it the way we did.

https://twitter.com/nazrisg/status/1688455801894268928?s=61

No doubt the celebration police will be out, and the memes mocking Arsenal players and fans for enjoying their victory in the warm August sun have proliferated. In all likelihood, if City had won and Haaland had posed, smiling, with the trophy, Gooners everywhere would be deriding the albino moose for his 0.00 xG and pitiful performance.

That’s football. It’s tribal.

But the fact that City now have to win four exponentially more difficult trophies in order to improve on last season is massive.

If they had won, they would be a quarter of their way to a Quadruple, and perhaps even a fifth of the way to a Pentuple.

But they aren’t.

Arsenal won.

With a convincing defensive display, multiple chances missed, and a stick-to-it-iveness that resulted in a late winner – something which is likely to be a hallmark in the upcoming season, with a new time-wasting clock enforcing heretofore un-enforced but existing time-wasting rules.

Who knows – perhaps this is the first of an Arsenal Quadruple (or Pentuple)?

Stranger things have happened.

invinciblog

I was eleven-and-a-half. My family had just emigrated from Rhodesia to South Africa. All the kids on my street supported United or Liverpool, because of their Southern African goalkeeper connections: Bailey for United and Grobbelaar for ‘Pool. Problem was: I didn’t like the colour red – so when FA Cup Final day came around in 1979, I supported the team in yellow, even though their name sounded like “Asshole”. At the final whistle, I had bragging rights and a team that had won my heart.

Then I discovered that the Gunners also wore red. Luckily, I remained loyal, and the Arsenal has kicked my heart around ever since… (apart from a few lost years in the ’90s and early ’00s, when I was busy doing grownup things as a composer in Hollywood).

Abandoned invinciblog.com to launch this site with 1 Nil Down 2 One Up blogfather Dave Seager – and we have used this platform to help launch the writing careers of a number of amazing Arsenal bloggers.