The huddle was silent, the image powerful. After watching another teammate stretchered off from the pitch, this time midfielder Lia Walti shortly after the restart of the Gunners’ eventual 4-1 win over Everton on Wednesday evening, Arsenal were forced to regroup once more.
At what point does Arsenal's season deserve an asterisk? It feels late now, the image of a dismayed player wearing the Arsenal shirt lifted onto a stretcher or emerging from the tunnel hobbling on crutches having become something of a haunting profile picture for the season.
Everton’s Aggie Beever-Jones did not intend to seriously injure Walti with her challenge. The 19-year-old issued a sincere apology afterwards. The situation underlines, once again, the need for a less permissive attitude with regard to the nature of officiating in the women’s top flight, which in turn leads to a litany of challenges permitted to go unpunished before one crosses the line.
Once again, Arsenal’s medical staff must find space on an already bloated injury list to scribble in another name. Only two matches remain of the WSL season, and yet Arsenal’s bench continues to recede at a baffling rate that has gone beyond tragic, into now the frankly ridiculous.
A better lasting image of this season, however, would be Wednesday night’s second-half huddle, a visible reminder of the character and defiance displayed by this Arsenal team in spite of their afflicted woes.
In his post-match assessment of Wednesday evening’s victory, Arsenal boss Jonas Eidevall once again found himself lauding his team’s unflappable character, evoking former Arsenal men’s manager Arsene Wenger as he did so.
"You can talk a lot about the sort of person you want to be but you don’t know until you come into this and when it matters, you show who you are,” Eidevall reflected. “I think it was Arsene Wenger who said there is a difference in football between personality and character.
"In football you can talk about being one way and that’s the person you want to be. But football will always reveal your character. Maybe not the first day but over time it will always reveal your character, you can’t hide, you will face adversity, you will face challenges and the players can be very proud of the character they reveal for this team because they are made of the good stuff."
The praise is not new. And still, it's yet to feel stale or unwarranted, rather more salient each time as the squad reinvents their standard for character with every passing match.
With two matches remaining in the season, Arsenal sit third in the WSL table, three points off second-place Manchester United and five points off reigning champions Chelsea despite season-curtailing injuries to five key players and short-term injuries littered throughout the season.
It can require conscious reminding that Arsenal ended a four-year trophy drought this season, not merely overcoming reigning champions Chelsea in the Conti Cup final mere days after suffering an FA Cup fifth-round exit to them but comprehensively outplaying them on every level. In fact, during Eidevall’s pre-match press conference ahead of Wednesday night, the Arsenal manager was queried on his thoughts regarding Chelsea’s domestic treble hopes, only for Eidevall to, ever politely, remind the room that Arsenal had in fact claimed the Conti Cup.
Such is the threat that injuries will overshadow an otherwise sensational Arsenal season, one in which Champions League qualification still rests firmly in the Gunners’ hands.
So while a date with league leaders Chelsea awaits on Sunday in the penultimate weekend, very few, if any, are counting out Arsenal to stake a firmer claim on their third place berth above Manchester City.
Eidevall would not be drawn on the prospect of claiming the league ahead of Wednesday night, neither explicitly dismissing the notion nor embracing it but opting instead to trot out familiar lines of one match at a time.
While part of this rudimentary response boils down to usual managerial press conference decorum, there is also the element of this Arsenal team continually springing surprises when shoved up against the wall; eclipsing their manager’s, and the league's, ever-evolving appraisal of their character.
Arsenal's season has been a constant test of their collective spirit. But Arsenal have, time and time again, passed it against the odds. With two matches remaining and Champions League on offer, the promise lingers that they will continue to do so.
