Arsene Wenger and The Circle of Life: Previewing Arsenal vs. Chelsea

On the face of it, this weekend represents the best chance in a long time for Arsenal to beat Chelsea in the Premier League. When the two clubs meet at the Emirates on Saturday evening, the home side will be coming off the back of a three-game winning run, while the visitors will be trying to recover from a draw with Swansea and a chastening defeat to Liverpool at Stamford Bridge. In the battle with his new managerial rival, Antonio Conte, the odds suggest that Arsene Wenger has a good chance of coming out on top.

But we all know that he won't. This is Arsenal we're talking about, and they're not going to pass up this excellent opportunity for making a catastrophic shitshow out of a potential win.

Not only are Arsenal almost inevitably going to fuck things up on Saturday, we can probably predict the manner of their crushing disappointment down to the last detail. They will start brightly, zipping the ball around with zest and flair, before Diego Costa scores a routine header, exposing his bollocks to the crowd in celebration without incurring so much as a caution. The subsequent angst and outrage will be compounded by a joyless hour or so of laboured attacking from the home team, before Chelsea nab a second on the counter attack in the 92nd minute. In the interim, Costa will have contrived to get a couple of Arsenal players sent off, and hundreds of fortysomething dads in the crowd will be red in the face from calling him names which, on a point of professionalism, we shall not invoke here.

We know all this because, well, that's basically what happened last year, and it would be against Wenger's principles not to repeat the process all over again. Wenger's life in football has come to resemble the ouroboros at this point; he is a snake eating his own tail, a metaphor for human cyclicality, a symbol of the eternal repetition of the universe, of existence, of reality itself. When Arsenal inevitably lose to Chelsea on Saturday, it will be a reaffirmation of the true majesty of the ever-recurring, ever-echoing cosmos. That's sort of comforting, in a way. In fact, if Arsenal somehow manage to win, it will probably herald the end of days.