What a glorious, peculiar evening of mixed messages from Arsenal, a team that seems to continually bounce between beautiful actions and moments of self sabotage. They will be quite an operation if they can get that split personality under control.
This was another of those days where, irrespective of the final numbers, Arsene Wenger’s side simply could not decide if they were fantastically gifted or plain daft. As they so often do, they settled on a compromise, coughing up so many mistakes in the first half that they should have trailed, before they gathered the senses and scored three goals through Alexis Sanchez, Olivier Giroud and Aaron Ramsey in the second.
At times, the speed of passing and thought was brilliantly Arsenal; at others, the errors were no less characteristic of the era. That is the beauty and the curse of this vintage, which has a chance to scratch the long title itch but still appears to have too many silly vulnerabilities.
Wenger said: ‘We started a bit hesitant - Watford showed that we had to be completely committed to win the game. It took us a while to get on top of that. Fatigue got to Watford and we got a convincing win.’
That, of course, is the main thing. And in doing so they have now won five of their past six games to sit second in the table. But even this coming week offers clues about the kind of inconsistencies that make Arsenal such a shaky bet to take that next step. It is incredible to think that after two woeful games against Dinamo Zagreb and Olympiakos they face Bayern Munich on Tuesday with Champions League elimination looking increasingly likely.
With so much at stake, perhaps it was a surprise to see Wenger go into this game with such a strong side, making only one change to the side that battered Manchester United in the final game before the international break. That saw Laurent Koscielny come in for Gabriel Paulista and, crucially, he let Sanchez stay in the team, despite a minor hip injury and his need for a rest.
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