Arsenal win EPL title after 22 years: Like an old flame, a forgotten but familiar feeling returns

Arsenal supporters walk past player murals as they gather near the Arsenal stadium to celebrate after Arsenal's soccer team won the Premier League title after 22 years. (AP/PTI)

In the late 1990s, the 1998 World Cup suddenly created a weird void for an early-20s football fan who wasn’t exactly a Brazil diehard. Instead, two European artists — Zinedine Zidane and Dennis Bergkamp — seduced you to fall in love with them that summer and ‘dil maange more’ was the standard catch-phrase for the insatiable soul. Back then, Zizou was at Juventus and Serie A, still the toughest league in world football at that time, wasn’t live on TV. Bergkamp, though, was more easily ‘available’. The Dutch playmaker was part of an Arsenal team that had won the Premier League under a French intellectual playing the beautiful game with a beauty that was alien to English football, and it instantly struck a chord. Through 1998-99, a 19-game unbeaten run, Bergkamp’s innumerable line-breakers and then a late-season heartbreak with Manchester United winning the league by one point --it was a perfect platform for football tragics, those who didn’t mind the so-close-yet-so-far storyline. But what started off as Bergkampstalking soon became an obsession once Arsene Wenger procured a new French lieutenant into the Arsenal stable in 1999. Thierry Henry’s arrival at Highbury wasn’t instant success, that was still the era of United but there was promise. As United jammed your eardrums with the noise of Fergie-time success, the magic touch of the French troika Henry, Robert Pires and Patrick Viera (and briefly, a moody but razorshrap Nicolas Anelka) created a symphony that lingered through days and nights. And then came 2004. While we keep talking about the glitter of the ‘Invincibles’ led by a magnificent Henry, that history-scripting season’s most crucial aspect of was ‘zero’ defeats by the Gunners. Arsenal’s backline let in only 26 goals — the same number that they have let over 37 games this season. Jens Lehmann, Ashley Cole, Koulo Toure, Sol Campbell, Fredrik Ljungberg, these were the men Wenger looked at to provide the steel. Just the way it was this season with David Raya, Declan Rice, William Saliba, Gabriel, Martin Zubimendi. It is perhaps this steel that had slowly gone missing from Arsenal once the euphoria of 2004 ebbed. They were still often brilliant a fine Champions League final run in 2006 being proof but the likes of United, Chelsea and consequently Man City took over the reins of EPL. There were seasons in between when Arsenal were competitive with hope soaring through winter. But as spring arrived, it all melted. By then Highbury was history, replaced by Emirates, but that once little softcorner did push you to take the long tube rides from Oval or St John’s Wood to Arsenal when you were on cricket reporting duty in London. But, by now, there was that acceptance that Arsenal don’t win. Over the last three years, under Mikel Arteta, they have been serious contenders, but you would laugh off the chances during football conversations with the standard line: “Let March come”. This year too, it threatened to be the same. Till it wasn’t. But that exuberance of being 28 has been replaced by the mellow light of 50, and it just felt good to be awake at 2.30 am, savouring a moment that you believed didn’t exist anymore.

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