The Kids Are All Right
I realised Arsenal are quite a bit better than the guys I play five-a-side with.
At the risk of doubling up, having already written about Arsenal decimating Real Madrid last week, I’d like to do it again because, well, they did too.
This wasn’t just a win. This was a punking. It ended 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabeu last Wednesday, where the remontada that had been so keenly scheduled to appear ultimately did not. And then 5-1 on aggregate, which somehow still downplays Arsenal’s dominance.
From the outset, Arsenal were locked in, hyper-alert, purposeful. They are a young team and a hungry one. You could sense that in every run, every pass, every move done with a degree of appreciation and excitement for the moment. Everyone from Declan Rice to Bukayo Saka, Mikel Merino to Myles Lewis-Skelly was on point, switched on, simply ready.
Real Madrid, on the other hand, were glassy-eyed and ageing, like a team expecting something to happen without ever really thinking that they should be the ones to make it happen. Hubris, thy name is Real Madrid. This competition has given them more joy than anyone, made them legends, and been the stage for their most incredible moments of magic. But on Wednesday, there was only really one team that bothered to show up.
Across both legs, Madrid looked like a team of actors trying to play football. They tried, sure, but that’s just about all you can say. Arsenal, by contrast, looked like a team of footballers living out their dreams.
And that’s really what this is about. Dreams. The quiet ones we hold onto, the loud ones we bravely proclaim, the fleeting thoughts of “one day, maybe I’ll do this” or “when I’m grown up...”
We all have dreams. Me personally, I’m fully grown up now and despite thinking to myself nearly every day from the time I was nine that one day, I’ll be a professional footballer, I am, in fact, not. Far from it actually. If the weather is good, and we can round up enough jobless lads and get them outside, maybe once a week, once every ten days, I’m an amateur – a kid, really – running around, shouting and screaming, misplacing passes, landing the occasional good touch, basically apologising a lot.
Here I am a kid, running and trying, and not thinking. There’s nothing to this game. If we’re lucky, we’re playing on the decent astroturf in the middle of Chinatown. If not, we’re on patchy uncut grass that feels more like weeds than it does a football pitch. But we’re here. Grass is grass, the ball is the ball, and the game is the same as it has always been.
This is me amongst a group of late-20, early 30-somethings who do this purely to get a break from their day jobs. Some who look for a reason to get outside and enjoy the sunshine, others who would like to believe they are the second comings of Messi and Ronaldo.
Mostly though, we’re like that one video of Ousmane Dembele failing to do a single juggle at his Barcelona presentation all those years ago. I suppose the only real difference is that Dembele finally became the player he promised he would be, while this lot are still shouting and rolling their eyes every time you don’t pass them the ball.
The crux of the matter I suppose is that they desperately want to believe that they are that good. That this dream that lives in their heads – that lives (lived?) in mine too – could have come true if not for some other inordinate life plan (hint: a severe lack of talent).
But the truth is that I don’t play football because I want to believe I’m good. Or because I want to feel like Messi or Ronaldo. I play football because it’s fun. Because I love it. Because of all the ways you could kill two hours, I think running around and chasing a ball is quite possibly the best one.
I play football because it’s fun and watching Arsenal play football on Wednesday, I got the sense that they do too. They were the dreamers, the ones enjoying themselves, the ones letting the moment – a Champions League knockout at the Bernabeu – get to them just enough that they revelled in it, without being totally overwhelmed by it.
They were also perhaps slightly better than me and the guys I play with. Lewis-Skelly, in particular, was fantastic. More to the point, it’s on evenings like this that we could do with a reminder that he is still only 18 years old, with as many Premier League games under his belt as birthdays he has celebrated.
I play football because it’s fun and watching Arsenal play football on Wednesday, I got the sense that they do too.
The thing about Lewis-Skelly that struck me is not that he didn’t look fazed at the Bernabeu, he very much did at times. And who can blame him? This is a hard place to go to, even more so when you are defending not only a 3-0 lead but also a mythology that has been years in the making, an imperious belief, a divine power.
But even in his fazed moments, like that early surge from Madrid down the right wing where you worried for a moment that the pace and power of Kylian Mbappe, Rodrygo and Jude Bellingham might be too much for poor little Lewis-Skelly, he still managed to walk away unscathed.
As the game progressed, though, those moments became fewer and farther between. Arsenal took control and save for one unforced error from William Saliba that Vinicius Jr punished, there was barely a scare.
Of course, as good as Mikel Arteta’s side were, please take nothing away from Real Madrid, who dished out arguably two of their worst performances since that 2018 post-Ronaldo recovery season.
In the Champions League, Madrid often have this knack of invoking the support of the football gods to do something outrageous and unexpected, except it’s no longer unexpected and perhaps that is the problem. How surprising is a comeback if you spend all week talking it up, but then fail to do anything to make it happen?
For Arteta, this game should mark a true stepping stone. Not just in performance, but in belief. This isn’t necessarily a next step in the process, but proof that the process itself has worked. Since his arrival, Arsenal have torn everything down and rebuilt from the ground up – binned the deadwood, bet on youth, built a project, and lived through the awkward teenage years to finally become something new.
And now here they are. It is epitomised perhaps best by Lewis-Skelly, only 18, so happily living his dream that perhaps he does not realise what exactly he is doing. Maybe that’s what it is. The Arsenal of today are what it feels like to be young and good and just naive enough to believe you can go all the way.
With young guns like Lewis-Skelly, Saka, and Martinelli, along with the more mature heads of Rice, Odegaard and Merino, Arteta’s project and promise are finally coming to fruition. Dreams are coming true. Potential is being reached. And the kids? The kids are more than all right.
They’re in the Champions League semi-finals.
