As the fight drained from Arsenal’s players, whatever grip Unai Emery still holds on the manager’s position loosened to the point of being imperceptible. It cannot be long before the club’s hierarchy get a handle on the damage being caused.
If they still needed convincing then they had only to survey the cavernous spaces around the Emirates Stadium, which has surely never hosted a first-team fixture to a crowd this low, or properly analyse the nonexistent response to adversity Emery’s players displayed after two fine finishes from Daichi Kamada turned the match around for Eintracht Frankfurt.
Arsenal have in effect been suffering death by a thousand cuts but it should be no surprise if those goals, scored either side of the hour to render Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s first-half strike irrelevant, constitute the decisive blow for Emery.
He is trying everything, which is perhaps one reason for his troubles, but nothing is coming off and matches like this suggest things are not going to change quickly. The question now is whether he can stumble on as far as Sunday’s visit to Norwich, where points are desperately required in the Premier League.
It is usually tempting to regard Europa League nights as relatively free hits, devoid of top-flight pressure and generally against opponents who lack the capacity to bring Arsenal’s skittishness to the surface. So when Thursdays become part of the problem, entwined in what now seems a protracted farewell, it becomes hard to see where the light for Emery can possibly be.
Before the interval an experienced enough Arsenal team, picked with the clear intention of arresting their dire slump, played creditably and Emery was entitled to feel some cautious optimism. The more fanciful might even have wondered if this was the kind of low-key, unassuming occasion that would enter the history books as the day a flailing manager began clawing his way back from the brink.
But the time for fairytales feels a long way gone. Arsenal had spurned enough chances to give rise to a familiar sinking feeling when Kamada, first spearing an excellent left-foot effort past Emiliano Martínez and then drilling in low with his right after a corner had been half-cleared, awoke a previously sleepy Eintracht and the unfortunate truth is that at no point from then did Emery’s players seem remotely capable of changing the outcome.
In many ways the tone had been set from the start, when the teams emerged to a stadium clearly under half full. That owed in part to a ban handed down to Eintracht’s supporters as a result of disorder during their match against Vitória Guimarães last month, and in some degree to the perceived drudgery of Europa League football. But above all it spoke of the sheer disillusionment. This was hardly the scene for a rousing night’s work but at first it was Arsenal who appeared more comfortable.
Emery had chosen to reintegrate Granit Xhaka, his deposed captain, from the start after five games off. Last time he played at the Emirates, the midfielder and his public managed to bait each other into a rage; he was greeted neither by red carpet nor seething bear pit on his return and in that sense one part of the occasion was a success.
Xhaka even received warm applause when he soldiered on after taking a heavy knock from Djibril Sow. He also missed a half-chance to score and, before everything unravelled, showed neat footwork to tee up an opening from which Calum Chambers might have made the game safe.
By that time Arsenal should have been home and dry. Aubameyang had missed an 11th-minute header, perhaps distracted by the jump of his teammate Joe Willock, and the Eintracht goalkeeper Frederik Ronnow had saved well from Gabriel Martinelli, Bukayo Saka and even his own colleague Martin Hinteregger. If Arsenal were not quite fluent they were certainly sparky and insistent. When the impressive Martinelli made good ground down the right flank, Aubameyang met his low centre and shot first time. He did not catch it perfectly but, via Ronnow’s foot and the underside of the bar, the ball went in and those who had turned up had something to enjoy without reservation.
But it did not last long and perhaps the key moment was when Willock, darting through within moments of the restart, was denied by Ronnow when a second goal seemed likely. Eintracht subsequently established a foothold for the first time and when Kamada struck his first goal a hitherto quiet bank of fans in the ground’s middle tier – usually given over to hospitality tickets – suddenly erupted.
Several hundred German supporters had found their way in and, from that moment until long after the final whistle, their noise echoed around the emptying stands. Arsenal rarely looked like quietening them, Saka seeking a penalty more in hope than expectation. Emery bemoaned the in-game injuries sustained by David Luiz and Shkodran Mustafi, which meant Alexandre Lacazette and Nicolas Pépé could not be deployed from the bench.
Perhaps he had a point but, at this stage, individual mishaps can hardly be used to paper over Arsenal’s malaise.
As it happens, this result is unlikely to have affected their prospects of playing in the knockout stage after Christmas – it would take a gargantuan failure in Liège in two weeks’ time to change that – but the chances of Emery overseeing that seem vanishingly slim. If these really were the last rites, the crumb of comfort is that so few people were there to witness them.
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