Tottenham Hotspur’s embarrassing 5-1 capitulation at Newcastle, combined with Arsenal’s 4-0 win at home over relegated Aston Vila allowed the Gunners to finish second and celebrate St Totteringham’s Day – the day when Arsenal have gathered enough points to assure a finish ahead of Spurs.
It is a remarkable record that Arsene Wenger has never finished below Spurs in the table since arriving in North London in 1996.
Just as remarkable though is the fact that Arsenal’s second place finish is the first time they have finished in the top two for the first time since 2005, when they were runners-up to Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea. For a club the size of Arsenal that is simply not good enough and in his post-game press conference Arsene Wenger admitted that he thought they were going to win the title:
“We are not happy by being second, but 18 other teams would be happy to be in our position.
“You have to say Leicester have been exceptional – they lost only three games. It’s not only us who are behind them and we have beaten them twice.
“We are second in the league and we wanted to be first, but you cannot say first is good and all the rest is rubbish. We have made over 70 pts and in the Premier League that’s not easy.
“We don’t start the season thinking we want to finish above Tottenham, we start the season thinking we want to win the league. For a while we believed we could do it.
“But I think we kept going until the end. The only target before the game was to finish second and we achieved it, so at least today the supporters had some satisfaction.”
Regardless of how Wenger tries to spin it, Arsenal finished 10 points behind leaders Leicester. And the Gunners 71 points was their lowest total since the 2011-12 season.
Olivier Giroud’s hat-trick on the final day, making him Arsenal’s top goalscorer in the league with 16 goals, will do little to dispel the idea that he is simply not good enough to lead the Gunners to the title.
Wenger resisted pressure to sign a striker last summer insisting that with Sanchez, Giroud, Welbeck and Walcott he had enough fire power. Time has shown that judgement was a mistake. Will the Arsenal manager correct that this summer?