More. More of this. On a thrilling, fun occasionally toxic afternoon Arsenal and Tottenham produced a wickedly entertaining derby game; an afternoon undercut time and again by elements of grace from Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who basically ran this game from the front.
Life is, they say, a series of moments. This was an Aubameyang performance of high-grade, decisive moments, strung together by the fine thread of his relentlessly easy movement.
The last of those moments came 10 minutes after the final whistle. Aubameyang and Mattéo Guendouzi were the last Arsenal players out celebrating with the fans, Aubameyang skanking along to the high notes of the dreadful Sweet Caroline, Guendouzi stooping down at one point theatrically to polish his boot.
There was an ugly exchange in the first half as Aubameyang celebrated near the corner flag and had a flurry of objects thrown at him by the Tottenham fans, one of which was a banana skin. The supporter has been arrested and an FA investigation will follow.
Back to the Aubameyang moments, though, and the best of those was the obvious one, the sublime second-half goal that changed this game, and which advertised his own brutal brilliance. Trailing 2-1 at half-time Arsenal had barely been inside the Spurs half after the interval. At which point Aubameyang levelled the game with a breathtaking finish, one of those moments where an athlete moves with such prescience they almost seem to be acting in slow motion, seeing the goal before it happens. Unsurprisingly perhaps: Aubameyang has now scored with his last 10 shots on target in the league, the last save from his boot way back in August.
Two passes made it. Héctor Bellerín fed the ball in to Aaron Ramsey, who flicked inside towards his striker. There was no obvious craning of necks around the ground, none of that gathering thunder when a goal is suddenly glimpsed in outline. Except, that is, for Aubameyang, who knew what was about to happen a beat before anyone else. The right-foot shot was beautifully vicious, zinging past Hugo Lloris and into the corner.
He even had the foresight to sprint across and celebrate in front of the exact pocket of Arsenal fans treated to a finger-shushing celebration by Eric Dier after Spurs’ equaliser, a situation only diffused by Mauricio Pochettino sprinting down the touchline in his dark suit, like a secret service man haring towards the presidential motorcade.
And so it went on. Those cold, clean Aubameyang moments kept cropping up out of the sturm und drang. He had already converted a penalty kick with wonderful ease. Later he made the third goal with a lovely slid pass for Alexandre Lacazette. He ran and harried and – yes – leapt for headers with a shark-like sense of purpose. With seven minutes left he hustled after three Spurs players with such venom as they passed the ball in a tight triangle that he twice ended up scrabbling on the floor in a kind of high-press breakdance.
This is significant in itself. In his final year at Borussia Dortmund the complaint about Aubameyang was that he did little but score (which is, if you’re going to do just one thing, not a bad one to choose). From a hard-running Klopp-style centre forward, Aubameyang had become a flâneur of the penalty box. By the end there was criticism of his training. He came to the Emirates a high-grade player who had hit a plateau.
Fast-forward to his first season under the unforgiving eye of Unai Emery and Aubameyang is not only the Premier League’s top scorer; he can produce this too, in its own smooth, slinky way a complete centre-forward display. By the end he’d touched the ball 43 times, each one to its own good purpose: seven of those were either shots or headers won, two of them tackles.
In between he ran constantly, veering in time and again behind the Tottenham centre backs, who will be looking over their shoulders as they brush their teeth tonight just to check that shape flashing past in the mirror was not the man with the Kramer-flick hair, the evil grin, the feet that barely seem to graze the turf as he glides away.
The Emirates had found its best voice at kick-off. That is to say it had at least found a voice, with a crackle of genuine electricity surging around the stands of this swooping, cantilevered superdrome.
Arsenal fielded their most muscular, hard-running XI from the start, and began with real vigour down both flanks in a widely-pitched 3-5-2 shape.
A corner led to a slightly bizarre opening goal, Jan Vertonghen handling pointlessly. Aubameyang took the kick with a predator’s severity, waiting for Lloris to dive, then rolling it into the corner. Spurs began to fire their pressing game. But Arsenal did not blink, pressed back, Lucas Torreira, who had another wonderfully authoritative game, taking charge of the clinches.
The question from here, as ever, is whither Arsenal now. Mesut Özil was missing for this big game. So, no change there then. Özil had suffered back spasms in training, meaning he missed a second match of notable “intensity”. In his absence there was a fury to this Arsenal team as they fought their way back, led from the front by a performance of Total Aubameyang that hints at the levels this team might yet reach.