Nine years. Nine years without a trophy. Nine years of “next year will be different” and “we’re building something” and all the other phrases that eventually lose their meaning through repetition, like a word you say too many times until it dissolves into nonsense. Nine years, and now, finally, wonderfully, agonisingly, we are back at Wembley with a chance to end the drought.
The road to the semi-final
Arsenal’s FA Cup run this season has been characterised by the sort of dramatic tension that you would reject as implausible in a screenplay. Nothing has been straightforward. Nothing has been comfortable. Every round has demanded something extra, some reserve of character that we weren’t always certain this squad possessed.
And now Wigan Athletic stood between us and a place in the final. Wigan, the holders. Wigan, who had beaten Manchester City in last year’s final with a performance of such bloody-minded determination that it had entered FA Cup folklore. They were not to be taken lightly, and anyone who thought otherwise hadn’t been paying attention.
The match
For ninety minutes, the match was a thing of excruciating tension. Neither side could find the breakthrough, not for want of trying. Arsenal created chances — good chances, the kind that on another day you’d expect to be taken — but the ball wouldn’t go in. Wigan defended with the stubbornness of a side that knows exactly how to win cup ties and were dangerous on the counter-attack, each breakaway sending a jolt of anxiety through every red-and-white section of Wembley.
Extra time brought more of the same. Tired legs, frayed nerves, the hollow echo of a stadium holding its collective breath. Per Mertesacker, that magnificent German lighthouse, marshalled the defence with the composure of a man who has seen rather worse than this in his career. Cazorla probed and prodded. Podolski, introduced as a substitute, brought fresh energy without quite finding the decisive moment.
And then: penalties. Of course penalties. Because nothing about this journey was ever going to be simple.
The shootout
I have a theory about penalty shootouts. They are not, as commonly stated, a lottery. They are a test of nerve, pure and unadulterated, and on this afternoon, our nerve held. Lukasz Fabianski — a goalkeeper whose Arsenal career had been defined by errors and eclipsed by others — was magnificent. He saved. He dived the right way. He made himself enormous.
There are moments in football when a player’s entire career at a club is redeemed in a single passage of play. Fabianski’s penalty saves at Wembley were precisely that. Every dropped cross, every fumble, every moment of doubt — all of it was washed away.
When the final penalty was converted, the eruption was something I will carry with me for a very long time. It was not merely celebration — it was release. Nine years of accumulated tension and frustration and near-misses, all of it pouring out in a roar that seemed to shake the old stadium to its foundations.
What this means
We are in the FA Cup final. We will face Hull City at Wembley with the chance to win our first trophy since 2005. Let me write that again, because it deserves to be savoured: we are in the FA Cup final.
The cynics will point out that we haven’t won anything yet. They are correct, technically, but they are also missing the point entirely. This was about more than a place in the final. This was about proving — to ourselves as much as anyone — that this Arsenal side is capable of handling pressure, of navigating the kind of tense, uncomfortable match that has so often been our undoing.
Think back to the defeats that have punctuated the barren years. The League Cup final against Birmingham. The various Champions League eliminations. The capitulations at crucial moments. In every case, there was a moment when the collective will seemed to falter, when the weight of expectation became too much. Today, that did not happen. Today, when the moment demanded character, character was forthcoming.
There will be more to say about the fire that has driven our season — the derbies won, the battles fought. But today belongs to Wembley. I walked away from Wembley into the April evening with a feeling I had almost forgotten. Not quite joy — that will come, I hope, on the 17th of May. But something adjacent to it. Relief, perhaps. Or vindication. Or simply the quiet, stubborn belief that this time, this year, it might actually be different.
As we explored in our piece on the beginnings of belief, the turning points in a club’s history are rarely obvious at the time. They become clear only in retrospect, when you can trace the line from one moment to the next and see the pattern emerge. I suspect — I hope — that this afternoon at Wembley will be remembered as one of those moments. The day the drought began to end.
Nine years. How sweet it is, indeed.