Mikel Arteta dropped to his knees in the technical area as Kai Havertz's free header from a Leandro Trossard cross flew just over the bar in the 95th minute. That is the image the broadcasters replayed and that is the frame the pundits have seized on. Watch it three or four times and you can feel the title race being buried inside ninety seconds of slow-motion television.

Then you look at the table and remember what is actually there. Arsenal are at 70 points and Manchester City at 67. There are five league matches remaining for us. A home fixture against Newcastle next Saturday, then Fulham, West Ham, Burnley and Crystal Palace. We are three points clear of Pep Guardiola's side at the top of the table, in the semi-final of Europe, eight months into a season we have led from the first weekend. Mikel Arteta said as much in the press room after the final whistle. The national media has spent the evening saying something else.

Despite the narrative the media and the pundits are trying to push, if you look at the actual match stats you will see a completely different picture. City, as expected, had more possession of the ball than us at 58.6 percent, while we had 41.4 percent. But we were more dangerous with the ball than them, with expected goals of 1.62 compared to City’s 1.36. We produced the better attacking performance by the only underlying metric that actually tracks chance quality. We also created more big chances (2) then them (1).

Rayan Cherki gave City the lead in the 16th minute, going past two defenders before slotting past David Raya. We were level a minute later when Kai Havertz, who recorded nineteen high-intensity pressures in the opposition half before half-time and more than any other player on the pitch, closed down Gianluigi Donnarumma's delayed clearance from a throw-in and deflected it into the empty net.

The first half ended level. The second half is where the margins started working against us. In a three-minute window just after the hour, Martin Odegaard slipped Havertz through on Donnarumma and the Italian goalkeeper atoned for his earlier error with a huge save. Two minutes later, Eberechi Eze curled the ball against the inside of the post and watched it roll across goal before being cleared.

Before Haaland's goal, Arsenal twice worked Havertz into running lanes behind the City defence. The first time, Khusanov got across to block from Madueke's cross. The second was the moment the match turned. Havertz was through on Donnarumma with the goalkeeper stranded, and Khusanov hauled him down as the last man. It was a foul. It was a clear denial of an obvious goal-scoring opportunity. It was a red card by any honest reading of the Laws of the Game. Anthony Taylor waved it away and VAR did not intervene. Khusanov stayed on and City went up the other end minutes later and scored the winner.

This is the same Khusanov, incidentally, who was not sent off for an almost identical challenge on Kevin Schade in the Carabao Cup quarter-final in December. At some point the pattern stops being coincidence. Fifty-fifty calls that go your way keep you in title races. That one did not, and it did not because the officials did not do their job.
Minutes after that, Jeremy Doku got down the left, Nico O'Reilly picked out Haaland, and the Norwegian, while tugging on Gabriel's shirt, swivelled in the six-yard box to finish past Raya. We then hit the post again through Gabriel from a deep Odegaard free-kick, and Havertz headed the Trossard cross over in the 95th minute.

Two strikes of the woodwork, a higher xG than the opponent, a denied red card for Khusanov. On another day we would have come away with at least a point, but yesterday it was not meant to be. Arteta was entitled to feel aggrieved and he was. "The biggest disappointment is that we did a lot of good things during the game," he told BBC Radio 5 Live. "They created some individual moments, and we created the biggest chances of the game, but we didn't score. There was an element of luck, and hitting the post was unfortunate. It has to go your way, and it didn't."

Even Pep Guardiola refused to sell the narrative the media has been peddling all evening. "Momentum changes," he told Sky Sports. "People said to me that the momentum from Arsenal is bad. What I saw today wasn't a bad momentum. They are in the semi-final of the Champions League, where they haven't lost a single game." When the opposition manager is publicly refusing to pile on, it tells you how thin the "Arsenal have collapsed" story really is.

In the press room at the Etihad, Arteta said what the rest of us were thinking. "I didn't see a difference in momentum between them and us today, and that's the biggest thing," he told BBC Radio 5 Live. "You can talk about momentum, but after you have to show it on the pitch, and I didn't see it."

Arteta was not going to feed the narrative, and he should not have. "The positive thing is we have seen the level, we can cope with that, and not just that but do even better," he said, via Sky Sports. "There are five games to go, but we're going to give a real go for it. We have full belief we can do it. Today we have shown the team that we are. It's still in our hands, and it's there for the taking. We were close, not close enough. But now we have to reset. We lost an opportunity today, a big one. But there is still another five to go. There are still a lot of positives today."

Even Martin Keown, who has been as even-handed as any former Arsenal figure on television this season, said the quiet part loud on BBC Radio 5 Live. "I'm sitting here as a proud Arsenal man. I don't see anybody from an Arsenal perspective heading off this pitch with their heads down. They've given a good account of themselves. It's certainly not over, there's plenty of football left in the Premier League."

The numbers that actually matter are the ones in the fixtures column. We have five Premier League matches left: Newcastle (home, 25 April), Fulham (home, 2 May), West Ham (away, 10 May), Burnley (home, 17 May), Crystal Palace (away, 24 May).

Three at the Emirates, two in London, no travel outside the capital. City have six remaining, with the extra game coming midweek at Burnley, and they play three home and three away, including the same Burnley and Palace fixtures we do, plus a trip to Villa and a home game against Bournemouth.

The three-point gap is a three-point gap. City need us to drop more points than they do across the last month of the season. They have been unbeaten in the league since January 17, which is a good run. We have lost back-to-back league games for the first time since December 2023, which is definitely a wobble. Both things can be true and the title can still be ours. City must first win their game in hand against Burnley on Wednesday to move level on points and then hope the goal-difference gap, which is currently +37 to +36, breaks their way at some point across the final five weekends.

That is where the maths stops and the football begins. Newcastle at home next Saturday is the fixture that now sets the temperature of every week that follows. Win it and City are chasing us into May with no margin for error. Do not win, and the Etihad starts to look like the place we handed it over. We have spent the season playing ourselves into a position where five games, three at home, decide whether twenty-two years ends in a parade down Upper Street. There are still a lot of games to be played for people to write us off already.

There is a Champions League semi-final against Atletico Madrid to play, and we go into it as the only unbeaten team remaining in the competition. We beat Diego Simeone's side 4-0 at the Emirates in the league phase in October. The first leg is at the Metropolitano on 29 April and the return leg is at home on 5 May. Between those two Tuesdays sits a home league match against Fulham.

We have to take the positives from the Etihad and carry them into the next fortnight. We went toe-to-toe with them and were better than them for large parts of the game. The finishing was the only problem, and it is something that we have to fix before our next game.

The run-in is still in our hands. We just have to believe in ourselves.