Why Manchester United are Arsenal’s greatest weakness

Beyond three valuable points in the hunt for a top four spot, the 4-2 victory over Chelsea handed Arsenal something less tangible: momentum.

How Tottenham will be feeling won’t be too dissimilar to how Arsenal fans felt when Spurs secured that soul crushing last-gasp win at Manchester City in mid-February. Everyone associated with either club is looking at the other’s fixtures to pick out potential slip-ups. Stamford Bridge was supposed to the Gunners’.

In Spurs’ case they followed up their Etihad triumph with 1-0 defeat at Burnley. All their hard work was undone. Manchester United could evoke similar emotions if the momentum and outcome of Wednesday night is thrown away.

But in order to turn that result into a potential winning run they must overcome what has hampered them all season: beating teams in dire form.

Arsenal’s greatest weakness this season has been facing teams in poor form and Manchester United are a Premier League side in decline

• Crystal Palace: 0 Premier League wins at home in 2022 – Beat Arsenal 3-0
• Brighton: 0 Premier League wins in 7 (6 defeats) – Beat Arsenal 2-1
• Southampton: 0 Premier League wins in 6 – Beat Arsenal 1-0

This is this team’s kryptonite. Chelsea fans colloquially call themselves Charity FC for the same reason, but Arsenal reign supreme in this most unwanted of titles.

Every time a team comes up on the fixture list who are in some form of disarray or aiming to bring an end to a degree of turmoil, Arsenal hand out the gifts. It happened at Goodison Park on matchday 15 when they secured their first win in nine matches, and even the reverse fixture against Manchester United saw Arsenal lose off the back of the hosts winning just once in five matches and sacking Ole Gunnar Solskjaer but two games prior.

There is no real explanation for why this is. The excuse of teams upping their game when facing Arsenal does not apply, since the fear factor this team once exuded hasn’t been at its previous level for years.

Defeats in such instances are even tougher to swallow. Now, when there are six games to go in the Premier League season and the fate of the team firmly in their own hands, they have to rid themselves of this irritating and fairly embarrassing curse.

Ralf Rangnick’s men have won just two of their previous nine matches in all competitions – both wins ending 3-2 – and one of those was a fluky home victory over Norwich who battled back from 2-0 down to be drawing entering the latter stages.

The club is broken from top to bottom, is having to leave their captain Harry Maguire out of the starting lineup on Saturday on account of a bomb threat at his home, and is missing Luke Shaw, Paul Pogba, Fred and Edinson Cavani through injury.

Labelled shameful, disgraceful, disinterested and disorganised, there really could be no better time to play them, which is exactly why this is the wrong time for Arsenal to face them. There would be more reason to be confident had they come into this game on a winning run.

Unbeaten in this Premier League fixture at the Emirates since 2017, and also having not even conceded during that time, everything suggests Arsenal should win. Comfortably, one might say.

If there was ever a time to live up to expectations, it’s this Saturday. There is no more time in the schedule to be handing teams needless gifts.