PSG vs Arsenal is proof that the Gunners can slow down time

Until a goofy German working in a Swiss patent office came along, we all took the English word for how the universe worked. There was wisdom that time flew linearly at the same pace for everyone and space was a big stage that stopped. But then the patent officer showed that time is not only not absolute, but depends on two things: motion and gravity. We call it relativity. The closer one gets to the speed of light or the stronger the gravity, the more time slows down. But the genius didn’t know there was another way to slow down time to the point where you wonder if time has passed at all: watching Arsenal in the Champions League final against Paris St-Germain in Budapest.Now, as Natasha Romanova kept saying to Hawkeye in the MCU, we’re all going to remember Budapest very differently.PSG fans will be delighted to win back-to-back Champions Leagues and become the second team to defend the Big Ears in Europe after Zinedine Zidane’s Real Madrid. Arsenal fans will be wondering how it could have turned out if Gabriel could have kept the ball a little lower in the penalty shoot-out. And neutrals will wonder what karmic crimes we committed in our previous lives to watch a final so action-free that there were only five shots on goal in 120 minutes, with PSG having 75% possession and Arsenal only making 69 passes in the first half.Death by boredomThe story of the evolution of the eye is particularly interesting: it started as a bit of light-sensitive skin, became a shallow bowl, followed by a pinhole, and finally the light-carrying ones we now have on our faces. The process took nearly half a million years, but anyone who watched this finale would wonder if it was worth the wait.There’s a word on soccer Twitter to describe the game we watched last night, one that was so hypnotizing at times that one of my guests actually started snoring while watching: haramball.For the uninitiated, the term haramball refers to a style of football where the goal is to score one goal and defend to the point that the attackers begin to ask ontological questions about the meaning of life. And that was Haramball Pro Max the moment Kai Havertz scored in the fifth minute.Mikel Arteta learned his craft at the feet of Pep Guardiola, who in turn was inspired by the great Johan Cruyff and El Loco Marcelo Bielsa, but anyone who watched Arteta’s team this year will wonder if he secretly Eklavyed and learned his trade from the statue of Jose Mourinho instead.Arsenal stifled every PSG attack to the point where you wondered if they were the same 10 outfield players who beat Inter Milan 5-0 last year, just switched bodies.Now, sports fans often say that stats never tell the whole story, and the eye test is a more accurate measure of tasting a vintage and seeing the whole Hegelian picture, but in this case, neither the stats nor the eyes lied: this was a snoozefest.PSG had 75% of possession and made 806 accurate passes to Arsenal’s 196 over 120 minutes. Arsenal managed seven shots and one on target, while PSG managed 21 shots with four on target. It was a game of football that managed just five shots on target in 120 minutes and Arsenal’s only goal was a Havertz goal, meaning Matvey Safonov lifted the Champions League after a final in which he had to keep a clean sheet.Arsenal managed just 69 passes in the first half, the lowest ever by any team in a Champions League final, which would see even Tony Pulis off the hook.The game followed a simple arc: Arsenal compact, Arsenal narrow, Arsenal blocking central spaces, Arsenal asking PSG to have all the ball and do something smart with it. PSG tried to move Arsenal around but they just shuffled the ball around with the efficiency of a set being moved across the desks of various bureaucrats.The breakthrough came after one mistake by Arsenal, when the Gunners’ third-choice right-back Cristhian Mosquera fouled Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Dembele equalized from the spot. But that goal didn’t open anything up. Arsenal refused to attack despite losing their lead and despite a furious late penalty appeal, the game looked destined for a shootout. There was something about Eze’s stuttering run-up that almost suggested he would be missed, and the moment Gabriel stepped up to take the decisive penalty, one was almost reminded of John Terry coming on against Edwin van der Sar all those years ago in Moscow.Gabriel was the heart, soul and rock of this Gunners team, much like John Terry, and yet when he stood over the ball it almost felt as if he had missed it because fate, like football, always plans the cruelest scenarios.It wasn’t so much a football match as PSG’s attempt to guess the CAPTCHA drawn by Mikel Arteta, but this match also lacked the frenzied intensity of rear-guard action where one team’s attacking waves are repelled time and time again. Like when Messrs. Cambiasso, Zanetti, Samuel, Maicon and Lucio stopped Barcelona’s best team in the semi-finals in 2010. Or when Ji-Sung Park overshadowed Andrea Pirlo so much that he called him Ferguson’s “attack dog”.There was nothing about PSG’s football that suggested they were willing to take the risks required in normal time to win a match, the kind of risk-taking behavior we’ve seen from great attacking sides.Football by consensusPerhaps this is due to the regulation that has taken place in football, where every blade of grass must be numbered and every pass has a risk score. Wingers don’t dust their boots anymore because some guy with an excel sheet said that statistically cutting inside has a higher ROAS. Players seem to have Excel challenges in their heads instead of brains: recycle possessions, protect defenses, maintain structure, don’t anger the transition gods.Every striker is a false nine who needs to track back, every full-back an auxiliary midfielder and every goalkeeper a scrum-half. Tactical philosophies that were once a rarity are now the norm. The 4-4-2 with two dandy wingers on their feet, a hallmark of English football, has been replaced by a low-block 4-4-2, where Gyokeres is more likely to find himself defending in his box than in the opposition’s squad trying to score a goal.Now, there’s nothing wrong with efficiency, but we don’t want efficiency from football. That’s what we want from cars and air conditioners, not from our footballers.This was a match that screamed Bruno Fernandes. Perhaps that’s why Bruno Fernandes, who broke the Premier League assist record despite playing half the season in Ruben Amorim’s disgraceful 3-4-3, won every single Premier League gong despite United only finishing third.Football desperately needs its entertainers. Since the turn of the decade, those individual moments of brilliance have simply ceased to exist, and it’s hard to explain to anyone the joy of watching Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldinho or Cristiano Ronaldo before they bothered to score records. No-one remembers any member of the Greek team that won Euro 2004, yet everyone remembers that was the year a strange Scouse lad called Wayne Rooney broke through and almost dominated the tournament before breaking his leg.After the match, Declan Rice wrote on Instagram that “we will be back”. For the sake of the neutral football lover, one hopes they are not, or at least not a team that plays this kind of haramball. Because, as Einstein explained to us all those years ago: time dilation is very real, especially when this kind of football is on show.