There were 63 minutes on the clock at the Emirates and the crowd was unravelling. William Saliba had the ball at the back, Chelsea were level, the second half had belonged to the visitors, and the noise in the ground had shifted from encouragement to something closer to panic. Into that moment stepped Jurrien Timber, arms outstretched wide on the right flank, gesturing to the crowd to breathe, to calm down. And then he headed home the winner three minutes later from a Declan Rice corner. That image, the outstretched arms before the headed goal, tells you more about this Arsenal squad than any tactical breakdown ever could.

Mikel Arteta was doing the same thing on the touchline throughout the second half, arms spread wide, urging calm while sections of the home support were working themselves into a state. This is a squad that has internalised every word of the message. They do not always play beautifully, they do not always make it easy on themselves, but they know how to win and they know how to hold their nerve when the stadium is screaming at them to lose it.

Saliba opened the scoring from the very first corner of the game, and the mechanics of it were pure Arsenal. Bukayo Saka delivered deep to the far post, Gabriel produced an extraordinary leap to head the ball back across goal, and Saliba flicked it home, the ball going in off the unfortunate Mamadou Sarr who was making his full Premier League debut. It was clinical, ruthless, and entirely familiar to anyone who has watched this side operate from dead balls over the past four seasons.

Chelsea responded with genuine quality, particularly through Cole Palmer who operated in unfamiliar left-sided positions and caused real confusion for Arsenal's usually watertight midfield. Robert Sanchez also contributed to the anxiety levels, though mostly for his own side, looking edgy on the ball throughout the first half and nearly gifting Viktor Gyokeres a goal inside five minutes with a touch so heavy it belonged in a different sport.

Chelsea's equaliser arrived on the stroke of half time, coming from a corner of their own. Reece James whipped a delivery towards the near post, Piero Hincapie completely mistimed his clearing header, and the ball flew into the far corner past a helpless David Raya. Painful timing, painful manner, and the kind of goal that turns a comfortable lead into a very uncomfortable second half.

What followed was Chelsea at their most threatening, pinging the ball around with purpose and confidence, posing genuine questions of an Arsenal side that looked uncomfortable for long stretches. Then came Rice's corner, Timber's movement, a characteristically weak piece of goalkeeping from Sanchez who went nowhere near the ball, and Arsenal were back in front. Pedro Neto, already booked for dissent after Timber's goal, then lunged recklessly into Gabriel Martinelli just three minutes later and was gone for an early bath. Nine red cards in all competitions for Chelsea this season, from nine different players. You genuinely cannot make it up.

Arsenal saw it out, though not without making every supporter in the ground age five years in the process. In stoppage time, Alejandro Garnacho sent a ball curling towards the far corner of Raya's goal. Raya, whose bodyweight had shifted the wrong way, somehow changed direction mid-flight and hooked it wide with a save that defied reasonable explanation. Seconds later, Liam Delap bundled in a finish that was correctly ruled out for offside in the buildup. Then, mercifully, the whistle.

The narrative around Raya following the Wolves draw was predictable and largely lazy, with a portion of the media ready to make him the story, the weak link, the reliability problem that would cost Arsenal the title. Let them watch this performance back carefully and reassess.

Raya made a fine save in the first half to deny a James corner going in, clawing it away at the near post. He kept out a Joao Pedro header early in the second half. He denied Enzo Fernandez from distance. And then in the 93rd minute, he produced what was almost certainly the save of the Premier League season, twisting his body mid-flight to claw away a Garnacho cross that was heading into the far corner and taking the game to 2-2. It was a physically remarkable piece of goalkeeping. Saves like these not only win individual matches but also shape the outcome of entire title races. A team needs an elite goalkeeper to win the league and Arsenal have one in Raya.

Every time Arsenal win a game like this, I brace myself before going online, because I already know what is coming. The Daily Mail went with "hard to watch." Others reached for "Set-piece FC" as though it were a punchline rather than a description of the most surgically effective dead-ball operation in Premier League history. Several pundits spent more time questioning whether Arsenal deserve to win the title than acknowledging that they had just beaten a Chelsea side who dominated possession, created chances, and had a goal disallowed in stoppage time.

Arsenal won a game in which Chelsea had 57 percent of the ball, Reece James was causing genuine problems all afternoon, the away side had a goal chalked off in added time. And the dominant conversation afterwards was about whether Arsenal are good enough. If Manchester City had ground out exactly this result, every single one of those outlets would be writing about mentality, about experience, about what it takes to win a title when you are not at your best. The vocabulary would be completely different, because the subject is different, and that double standard has been running for years now and I am exhausted by it.

Arsenal have scored 16 goals from corners this season, the joint-highest total in Premier League history. We have scored match-winning goals from corners nine times in the league this campaign alone, more than any other team in a single season on record. When the numbers are this clear and this historic, describing it as a limitation is not analysis, but bias with a byline.

The last 15 minutes of this game were not comfortable viewing, and Arsenal had a man advantage from the 65th minute. Zubimendi gave the ball away in dangerous areas at moments when we should have been suffocating the game. Rice had a strange sequence where he booted the ball behind for a completely unnecessary corner. Arteta himself admitted afterwards that we should have managed the game far better once Chelsea were down to ten men, and he was absolutely right to say it.

That tendency to sit back and invite pressure when the game should already be dead is a pattern we cannot keep getting away with. Today, Raya bailed us out with a save that had no right to be made. An offside flag saved us from a Delap equaliser in the dying seconds. The margins are razor thin and at some point, if we keep inviting this kind of chaos in the final minutes, we will get punished and drop points we simply cannot afford to drop.

But we got over the line today, and that matters enormously. We beat Spurs 4-1 away from home, then beat Chelsea 2-1 at the Emirates today, and both results arrived on weeks when City had won the day before and cut the gap. Both times the pressure was maximum and both times we answered without blinking.

That is nerve, and in a title race with nine games still remaining, nerve is the most valuable currency. Five points clear, Timber composed, Raya immense. One game at a time. We keep going.