Arsenal and Leicester face off to decide who’s in a deeper crisis

You might think it was too early in the Premier League season for talk of CRISIS. One game! But to say so would be to ignore the fact that when it comes to the Premier League — as noisy as a pneumatic drill, as persistent as a toothache, as desperate for attention as a heavily-sugared toddler — it is never too early for anything. A CRISIS after one game? Pfft. We could have gone at halftime.

This coming weekend, the Premier League’s two leading candidates for CRISIS status go head-to-head in what some people are already calling a season-defining clash. Well, OK, nobody’s calling it that. But you can be sure that somebody at Sky is thinking about calling it that, and that’s enough. In the blue corner, champions Leicester; in the red-with-white-sleeves corner, Arsenal. Let’s weigh up the evidence, and work out which is the first CRISIS club of the season.

At first glance, this seems fairly straightforward. Leicester have played and lost two games — the Community Shield against Manchester United and their Premier League opener away at Hull City — whereas Arsenal have played and lost just the one. Basic maths makes that twice the CRISIS. Further, Arsenal’s loss came against Liverpool, who aren’t a bad side; Hull City, by contrast, are in such a state that one of their named substitutes on opening day was actually a mop with a paper plate for a face.

But there is the manner of these defeats to be considered. Manchester United turned up with a second-hand but still pretty decent Zlatan Ibrahimovic, which probably counts as cheating, and had Jamie Vardy not forgotten how to kick a football over his summer holidays, Hull wouldn’t have posed much problem at all. Whereas Arsenal ... oh, Arsenal. A one-nil lead, an equalizer out of nowhere, and then the world’s first recorded 34-minute halftime break. Rather rudely, Liverpool only took the standard 15 minutes, and while Arsenal were chewing down the oranges and bickering over the crossword, their guests were running wild on the pitch. And then, with the score back to 4-3 and Liverpool’s defense wobbling like a drunk blancmange, the home side couldn’t quite stick the comeback.

Can a single loss feel like two? Apparently so. Half a CRISIS point each. Wait, that’s an inadequate scale. 500 CRISIS points each.

Only one winner here, and it isn’t Leicester. There’s a reason it still feels a bit weird to refer to the champions as “the champions,” and that’s because their title triumph was very weird indeed. So weird that it violated all the widely accepted rules of the universe. But finishing eighth, say, would have been a perfectly acceptable season last time around, and while something similar this season would be quite the comedown, it wouldn’t be anything disastrous. Doing the impossible twice in a row is probably beyond even Wes Morgan, and so a few dropped points here and there are of no existential concern.

Whereas Arsenal’s loss, the manner of that loss, and the granular details — from the children at center half to Alexis Sanchez up front, from Aaron Ramsey’s injury to the overwhelming softness of the entire side — all fit perfectly, almost too perfectly, into the ongoing exercise in neurosis and calamity and stubbornness that is Late Wengerian Arsenal. So this wasn’t just one loss; this felt like notice that this season is going to be like last season, which was like the season before, and a promise that Arsenal will continue to exist in their strange, super-privileged limbo, playing expansive football in an expensive stadium, forever locked in the CRISIS of nearly, oh so nearly, but not quite, and OH FOR GOD’S SAKE THEO WHAT ARE YOU DOING YES I KNOW YOU SCORED THAT ISN’T THE POINT.

1000 CRISIS points to Arsenal!

Working from the basis that all of this only matters because we pretend it does, and that sport, in a wider, cultural sense, is at least in part a mutually accepted hallucination, we absolutely get to decide which team is in CRISIS by asking ‘well, which would be funnier?’ This is our show. We call the shots.

A Leicester CRISIS would be ... OK, we guess? The humbling of champions is generally pleasing, and a season of Vardy missing presentable chances and then punching himself in the face would be welcome. But it’s hard to truly get behind this, since Leicester lack the swagger of the self-appointed Big Clubs. They might be champions, but they still feel like cuddly underdogs.

By contrast, and to really drive the point home, an Arsenal fan on Twitter put his head in a Coke Zero box.

1000 CRISIS points to Arsenal!

So, back to this weekend’s game. The ultimate test of whether a team is in CRISIS is to imagine what happens should they lose their next game. And should Leicester lose on Saturday, then it will serve as notice that they might not manage to defend their title. Which we all sort of knew anyway.

Whereas Arsenal are already at the head-in-a-box-of-Coke-Zero stage. Until this week, who among us knew that was even a stage? And what might they manage to achieve should Vardy, who they failed to buy, or Riyad Mahrez, who they might have not been so bothered about buying but whatever, stick a couple past Petr Cech? The mind tingles with anticipation.

1000 CRISIS points to Arsenal!

A thundering victory for north London’s finest, who have hammered Leicester by 3500 CRISIS points to 500. Hopefully that makes up in some small way for the fact that there was no Emirates Cup this season.