In the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a young woman finds herself caught in the middle of an intensely passionate relationship between a highly creative couple. The artist Juan Antonio is at once an oddly tender man as well as a highly graphic, Hefner-type hedonist.
Here he has a chaotic relationship with a wife who shares much of his interests and qualities, the kind of union that would seem to have been hand-crafted in heaven, or an AI simulation of the perfect couple. Except things don’t quite flow that way. Juan Antonio laments that he and this carbon copy are meant to be together, and at the same time not meant to be together.
Then Cristina arrives and it turns out the third wheel is actually something greater. A catalyst of sorts. So long as Cristina is between the couple, caught between all that heat and noise, they have the perfect three-way relationship. She brings calm to their chaos. She is the thing that’s missing, the grease to the machine, the graphite in the nuclear reactor.
Not that she is simply there to make these other parts work better, though. In a way she is also the centre of the show, the most attractive piece, the one that catches the attention. Against Chelsea, Kai Havertz was similarly at the centre of affairs in an exciting Arsenal attack.
Yes, in the end it was only 2-1, but this was also a display of how good a football team Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal side are, and the way they move is exactly what you pay to see.
The second goal was quite straightforward, happening with only a few touches. But it was also quite simply the best piece of play of the evening. In the buildup, Christos Tzolis picks the ball up at the left-hand side and pierces Chelsea open with a slide-rule pass that finds its way into the box.
Then Havertz dummies. A sweet, beautiful thing, the sort of play you watch over and over again. In football dummies are always great to see. First because they have very high visual quality and they also take you by surprise. It’s not a dummy if everyone expects it.
But then they are also an excellent display of coordination, of a group of players who understand each other. Pure movement is the technique here. The dummy takes out the Chelsea defenders and the ball reaches Martin Odegaard, who is left with all the time and space to take a few touches before firing emphatically past Emiliano Martinez.
Havertz will probably, largely, be unsung here. Odegaard got the goal and Tzolis the assist. But the artistic creation belonged to Arteta’s forward-man, sagely preferred to Viktor Gyokeres for this game. Havertz may be slow and gangly, like a software developer from Silicon Valley who accidentally walked onto a pitch, but he is also really good at connecting the dots in Arsenal’s forward line. Arteta-ball is at its best when it’s free and flowing like this.
He was more than a contributor for the first goal to cancel out Morgan Rogers’ opener, driving inside from the right, past Wesley Fofana and then firing through the legs of Maxence Lacroix hard to Martinez’s left and in.
Arsenal always looked like scoring after Rogers had put Chelsea ahead in the second minute. Riccardo Calafiori’s scrappy goal showed their verve and determination but it was ruled out with Ezri Konsa offside. An equaliser was nevertheless inevitable.
Myles Lewis-Skelly was really good here too, generally outperforming Declan Rice at the base of midfield. Bukayo Saka looked active and sharp. By the end, Gyokeres had come on and replaced Havertz, and just like when Cristina ultimately left the couple, Arsenal lost a little bit of the magic in their attack.
Each of the two forwards offers something different to the team, but Arteta knows that Havertz’s style exemplifies the way he wants to play.
