Is this really the beautiful game? Well yes, and no … but the panic is fun to watch | Barney Ronay

London – In the marble-lined comfort of a Park Lane hotel where even the lavatories come with wireless thermostats, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters this week sketched a future in which every feint, foul and fluffed corner is piped straight to a six-inch screen in every pocket on earth. He called it “Premflix”, a direct-to-consumer firehose of football so potent it will, in his words, lasso the moon. Forty-eight hours later, 10 kilometres up the road at Emirates Stadium, the moon looked more like a medicine ball: heavy, slippery and liable to land on anyone’s toe.

Arsenal’s 2-1 victory over Chelsea was many things—vital, ugly, hilarious, excruciating—but it was not the high-gloss product Masters and Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly have been selling investors. It was, instead, a 90-minute wrestle-ball montage: two ultra-expensive teams locked in a tactical bear-hug, each apparently sentenced to play out eternity in the outer circle of footballing purgatory. The decisive moments? A free-kick won on the edge of the box, the subsequent corner, and a melee from which Jurriën Timber prodded home what proved to be the winner. Arsenal’s second set-piece goal of the afternoon. Chelsea’s consolation had arrived the same way. Between those two dead-ball scrambles, the match resembled a 300-year-old Derbyshire village contest in which 2,000 tattooed men attempt to carry a pig across a stream.

Yet for all the aesthetic outrage, the result leaves Mikel Arteta’s side exactly where they need to be: top of the table with nine games remaining, two of them conspicuously awkward, none of them forgiving. The mathematics are simple and brutal: win the lot and the club ends a 22-year championship drought. Drop points and Manchester City, lurking with their customary patience, will pounce. The aesthetics, in that context, are irrelevant. “If every win is going to be painful from here, you may as well just take the painful wins,” Arteta could have said, although the sentiment was already hanging in the drizzle-soaked north London air.

For 45 minutes Arsenal appeared to have no idea how to manufacture a goal that did not involve shoving bodies into the six-yard box and hoping for physics to intervene. Chelsea pressed selectively, denying passing lanes to the base of midfield, and Arsenal’s response was to recycle possession in cautious U-shapes that never quite became penetration. The Emirates crowd, jittery from kick-off, slipped into the nervous hum of a theatre audience watching the leading man forget his lines. Half-time brought the blessed relief of a scoreline still goalless and the guilty pleasure of knowing the title race might yet be decided by something as prosaic as a deflected Declan Rice free-kick.

That is, more or less, what happened. Rice’s set-piece clipped a blue sock, the linesman pointed for a corner, and from the delivery Arsenal scored. Chelsea equalised through their own variant of aerial pinball. The winner arrived after 73 minutes when another corner caused enough chaos for Timber to bundle the ball over the line. Cue delirium, relief, and the dawning realisation that Arteta’s team had banked six points in five days by the skin of their orthodontic work.

Critics will point to the absence of attacking identity, the reliance on set pieces, the sense that this is a side built to survive rather than seduce. They are not wrong. Arsenal have no signature outfield move, no automatic picture of how a goal should look. They are supreme without the ball, immaculate in transition, yet curiously blunt when asked to invent. It is still deeply strange that a squad dripping with technical talent must treat every corner like a scratch-card.

But strangeness is not the same as failure. The Premier League has always been a competition that rewards the capacity to endure. City’s recent vintage have made excellence look effortless; Arsenal’s challenge is to make desperation look like destiny. Nine games remain, and the narrative is binary: dogged march to immortality or slow-motion self-strangulation on the grandest stage.

Inside the Emirates, the tension felt almost radioactive. Sky pressed low over the roof trusses, the sort of afternoon when the weather itself seems to heckle. Yet the crowd refused to leave early; they have learned that late goals are no longer a miracle but a business model. If the price of contention is to watch their team run a marathon in a Victorian diving suit, they will pay it.

What the neutral sees is equally riveting. Masters and Boehly may dream of sleek, app-ready highlights, but football’s stubborn humanity keeps intruding. Give us the slapstick, the miscued clearances, the pundits furrowing brows at analytics that cannot quantify courage. Give us the possibility that the most sophisticated league on earth might be decided by a nosebleed and a toe-poke.