Morning all, and welcome to the first Monday of 2026. From a working point of view, given I took Friday off, it sucks. But from an Arsenal point of view, well, it has been a pretty successful and enjoyable Monday in which to write about the current situation.

I’ll be honest with you, at the beginning of the festive period when we had the late kick off against Everton, I never thought I’d be sitting here talking to you about how we’re now six points clear of our nearest rivals going into the busy January period. I thought we’d be looking at a tight two-point gap at best. But thanks to yesterday’s results, we’ve had a great ol’ time this weekend, kicking off with our hard-fought victory on Saturday, then being finished off by City’s surprise draw in stoppage time to managerless Chelsea.

I decided to switch on the game yesterday as I was cooking. I didn’t hold out too much hope for a Chelsea team that seems to be in a bit of limbo at the moment and has just sacked their manager. Man City, away from home, without your manager, with a record up there which is almost as bad as ours is. But stranger things have happened, so I figured I’d watch as much of it until City scored and then I’d switch it off. So when Reijnders hit the back of the net on 42 minutes, I decided that enough was enough, I was going to have my last Sunday roast for a while (diet starts today, unfortunately) and then watch some David Attenborough instead.

So as I made my way up to bed in the evening a few hours later, you can imagine my pleasant surprise to see that Chelsea had made something of a fightback in the second half, that they’d got that late equaliser, that we were now a bit more of a solid gap ahead of City and six whole points separated us, them and Villa respectively.

Happy days.

Paul Merson spoke in the aftermath of our win and said that he felt that the psychological pressure of having to win at home might have an impact on City, but I didn’t believe it. I had assumed that this would be a routine win and as always, had they held on for the 1-0 victory, the narrative would have been that they are grinding out our victories to keep pace with Arsenal. But the problem with results-based analysis is that it doesn’t do enough to tell you what is going on. Perhaps the reason why City didn’t do what I think most people would have expected them to do in that second half and go on to win by two or three goals is that they were feeling the psychological pressure a bit, and that led them to be a little bit more off the pace in that second half? Again, I can’t say for sure because a) I’m not in the dressing room, and b) I didn’t watch the second half. But given in December we had several games in which we retreated towards our own box whilst holding on to something (Villa = draw, Wolves = one-goal lead, Brighton = one goal lead having been two-nil up), that we as Arsenal fans and the media said that the team was already feeling the pressure of a title race, perhaps the same can be said for City and their players?

Some will point to the fact that City have ‘been there, done it before’ and of course Pep has, but his whole team haven’t. Having a look at his title-winning side of two seasons ago, the following players were pretty much ever-present (I’m calling that as somebody who has played more than 30 out of the 38 games) that season:

  • Alvarez
  • Foden
  • Rodri
  • Ederson
  • Silva
  • Walker
  • Haaland
  • Dias
  • Kovacic
  • Akanji

Those highlighted have left the team. But they also had Grealish and De Bruyne in there too. This season, new faces include Reijnders, O’Reilly, Gonzalez, Donnarumma and Chekri. Whilst some of those have admittedly won trophies before in other leagues, it is not the Premier League. Could it be that they are feeling the pinch of pressure just as much as we think our players have at times?

Maybe. Maybe I’m just putting two-and-two together and making 928. But one thing is for sure, based on 20 games played, this doesn’t feel like a City team that just bashed down the league. The City teams of two or three seasons ago ended up going on relentless 15-game winning streaks, and nobody would keep up. This City team don’t feel like that, and I think there will be more dropped points for everybody. Because I think we don’t feel like a relentless machine either. We have the strongest squad, for sure, but some of our attacking struggles prior to the Villa game cannot be ignored. We aren’t quite the clinical team that will blow this league away. Sure, we’re six clear at the moment, but I’m not naive enough to think that gap will just grow and grow to nine, 12 or 15 points as we make our way through the first half of 2026. I think we will have weekends where we’ll be pegged back; there will be times when the narratives spun will not make great reading for us as Arsenal fans, and we’re going to have to collectively take some deep breaths. I think we also need to appreciate and savour these moments in a season; the squeaky-bum weekends will come on the horizon, so take the time at periods like this to metaphorically sit back, smile and have yourselves a cigar.

The first one might be Liverpool on Thursday. It may be nice to see Liverpool sit in fourth, 14 points away from us, having drawn to a late equaliser away to Fulham yesterday. But they are still Liverpool, they will still carry lots of threat for us on Thursday and Arteta and his team still have to get the preparation right ahead of this important match-up. In much the same way that we would look at Liverpool v City as one in which it could be a banana skin for City, they will look at that in the same light this Thursday. So we have to find a way to overcome the Scousers.

Back tomorrow with some more thoughts as the extended build-up to that Liverpool game looms on the horizon.