All the words are irrelevant. All the predictions, all the platitudes, all total bunk. It is impossible to assess Arsenal’s Champions League qualifying tie with Udinese. Impossible to say whether it is a good draw, or a bad draw, a gimme or a hiccup. Arsenal, the Arsenal that will face the side from Italy’s imposing, austere north, on August 16 or 17 and a week later, too, do not exist.
When Giampaolo Pozzo, the owner of Udinese and the man responsible for turning eternal also-rans into one of the most innovative, enviable teams in world football, a team who pick up bargain after bargain by scouring every league on the planet, speaks of playing Arsenal as being like “going to New York for the first time,” he captures this existential crisis perfectly.
He means, of course, exactly what he says: “Arsenal are a historical team, and it is a fascinating adventure to face them. You need luck at times like this, and we need to face this experience with philosophy. It is a historical moment for our club.” He means that playing Arsenal, at the Emirates, is like that first trip to the city that never sleeps: the bright lights, the grandeur, the sense of being somebody surrounded by people who are somebody. The transsubstantiation of significance.
That is the Arsenal the exciting, attacking side put together by Pozzo, his son Gino and the club’s manager, Francesco Guidolin, would have faced if it was not for tortuous, inconvenient reality. That Arsenal are New York, in his analogy, of the modern day. They are the big time. But the Arsenal his team might face, the Arsenal that might exist on Aug 16, are a very different New York. They are the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, ravaged by regret, existing in the twilight glow of what they once were and what they might have been.
Pozzo does not know if his club will have to navigate a way past the Arsenal of his imagination, an Arsenal with Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri and possibly a couple of the additions Arsene Wenger and Ivan Gazidis promised the club’s fans before the start of the season, the Arsenal that have a habit of dispatching the continent’s lesser lights with contemptuous ease at the Emirates, or the other Arsenal. The Arsenal without any of those players, the Arsenal bereft of its stars and robbed of its luminaries. The Arsenal that was jeered from its own pitch after failing to win its own cup last weekend. That Arsenal.
It would be easy to think that Pozzo would be hoping for the latter, rather than the former. It is unlikely. Few men know quite so well that the phoenix can often be more impressive than the flames. After all, no team is broken up and reborn quite so often as Udinese.
Indeed, this summer, the club has lost Alexis Sanchez, Gokhan Inler and Cristian Zapata, arguably the three most important players in guiding Guidolin’s team to the Champions League. But that is what Udinese do: buy cheap, sell high, move on. They are possibly not the force they might have been, had the rules of football’s freakonomics been different. But Pozzo and his acolytes live in the hope that they will be even better, that the reinvestment will unearth yet another diamond, yet another star. They are used to that reality. They know how they exist, how they have to exist. Arsenal are still waiting for an answer to that question.
