\n<\/p>\n
When not pointing and laughing at whatever it is Spurs are currently doing to themselves, English football has been consumed by one subject for the last two months or so: are Arsenal bottling it or not?<\/p>\n
It really does feel as though the most regular bottlers in Premier League history<\/strong> might actually bottle it again.<\/p>\n We\u2019re not here to definitively answer the essentially unanswerable question, but it does intrigue us. What even is a bottle job? We submit that it\u2019s one of those things that\u2019s hard to define but one knows it when one sees it. We\u2019d also submit that it\u2019s more art than science. And also that your previous opinions and biases about the club involved are disproportionately important.<\/p>\n But we\u2019ve tried to provide a guide. Here, then, are eight factors that make up The Bottle Job\u2026<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Obvious starting point is obvious, but you\u2019d be surprised.<\/p>\n Yes, at the most basic level the bigger the lead you hold the worse a bottle job looks. Unofficially, anything in double figures is going to be pretty hard to explain away as anything else, but relatively small leads can be deemed bottle jobs in the right conditions. Or even no leads at all.<\/p>\n Spurs quite literally never topped the table in 2015\/16 or 2016\/17, which is in its own mischievous way the Spursiest bottle job of all. They even bottled going top of the table, most specifically in 2016 when they would have overtaken Leicester with a win at West Ham in a game they would lose 1-0. West Ham, by the way, are suspiciously good at inserting themselves into these situations more generally. Worth investigating.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n A corollary of lead size. The fewer games remaining, the smaller a lead needs for its loss to become a chokey bottle job. Liverpool\u2019s 2013\/14 performance \u2013 in many ways the archetypal bottling<\/strong> \u2013 encapsulates this one nicely. Going into the Chelsea game they only actually led City by six points having played a game more. But that brings events to a head, to a sharpened focus.<\/p>\n The flipside of this is that if you can do your bottling early enough you can often get away with it altogether. Chelsea themselves are fine examples of the genre.<\/p>\n Sure, Gerrard\u2019s slip and Demba Ba etc and forth, but Chelsea should have been far more than chaos agent in that title chase. They were seven points clear at one point, albeit with some games-in-hand chicanery involved, but dropped off the pace less hilariously to finish four and two points behind City and Liverpool.<\/p>\n But nobody cares. Indeed, we reckon a non-zero percentage of football fans would go even further than not remembering Chelsea\u2019s bottling that season and would actually have Mandela Effected themselves into thinking Chelsea actually won the title, so powerful and compelling is the narrative of that 2-0 win.<\/p>\n The other great example of getting your bottling out of the way under cover of winter darkness is of course Arsenal themselves in 2015\/16, using all their experience to spaff their golden chance of a title away far earlier than na\u00efve and silly Spurs.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Another seemingly obvious one that actually appears to count for very little. It should logically be far less of a Bottley McBottlejob to lose a lead to, say, a Manchester City team that pursued titles with the relentless remorselessness of a Terminator long before they actually had one scoring 50 goals a season than doing so to Claudio Ranieri\u2019s Leicester City or even Manuel Pellegrini\u2019s Manchester City.<\/p>\n But aside from the occasional acknowledgement of The Pressure \u2013 and even then often framed in bottlish terms of Succumbing To \u2013 it seems to get relatively little traction. Like we said: it\u2019s more art than science, more vibes than data. Which brings us on to\u2026<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Our theory, despite our attempt to codify things here, is that bottling is so much in the eye of the beholder that it will ultimately come down mainly to this: whether \u2013 and how much \u2013 other clubs\u2019 fans are going to be in any way inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n This one is becoming less important because nobody has a \u2018soft spot\u2019 for any other teams these days in the modern online world of tribal football fandom where every other club is a prick with terrible fans who deserve nothing but bad things and anyway they\u2019d chat sh*t about you if it was the other way round so no point passing up this opportunity to go at them, is there?<\/p>\n But still. The cruel facts are that Bottle Jobs are assigned from outside not inside your club. If other fans dislike you enough and if you\u2019ve got, say, a history of very loud and hubristic online fans, you don\u2019t need to do as much to find yourself on a one-way trip to Bottle Town.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Of course it matters. The more memorably ludicrous the better. Gerrard\u2019s slip and Crystanbul is the ultimate one-two punch here, but we go again to 2016 and the Battle of Stamford Bridge where Spurs threw away a 2-0 lead and spent much of the second half just forlornly booting Chelsea players about the place.<\/p>\n It was a classic head\u2019s gone masterpiece of bottling but here\u2019s the thing: if Spurs did bottle it in 2016 it wasn\u2019t really in that game. The 1-1 home draw with West Brom the week before was the end of any semi-realistic hopes of doing anything to halt Leicester\u2019s march. But who remembers that? Literally nobody. Because it was nowhere near as funny.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It definitely makes things worse if there is one specific moment that comes to sum up the entirety of a bottle job. One particular image that becomes burnt into the collective football memory of the nation. You\u2019re literally already picturing a slippy Steven Gerrard right now, aren\u2019t you? Or Kevin Keegan, face reddening under his massive headphones and jabbing a finger at a Sky Sports camera. Or Eric Dier booting people into the Stamford Bridge sky. Or William Gallas\u2019 sit-in protest at Birmingham. Or Rafa Benitez\u2019s facts.<\/p>\n It really doesn\u2019t matter whether the moment is actually that pivotal or significant. Or even where in the timeline it occurred. Those things will all blur and elide as necessary over time if the image or moment is sufficiently memorable and fits somewhere within a wider collapse for a team in need of the Heimlich manoeuvre.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Confirmation bias is a real and powerful thing. If you are, for instance, a club whose name has literally become a byword for bottling stuff, then it won\u2019t take much for it to resurface.<\/p>\n Goes without saying that this is bad news for Arsenal. If you were to score teams out of 10 for each category here, in this one you\u2019d have to award Arsenal, I don\u2019t know, 150 points.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n This is an important and slippery one. \u2018Nobody expected us to challenge anyway!\u2019 a bottling club\u2019s fans will continue to insist as they slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob. Taking a step back and viewing it dispassionately (LOL) it seems pretty clear this argument simultaneously carries far less weight than the bottling club\u2019s fans will insist but also far more than rival fans will concede.<\/p>\n Arsenal\u2019s very first bottling under Mikel Arteta is, of course, the absolute archetype here. There\u2019s no point pretending that, in the round, finishing second to Manchester City that season represented anything other than an exceptional and unexpected season for Arsenal, given they\u2019d spent the previous campaign bottling a top-four finish to Spurs.<\/p>\n But at the same time, ambitions and reality clearly shift across the course of a season. Aston Villa would not now settle for what they would have taken after five winless games in September, would they?<\/p>\n Bottling an unexpected situation can still absolutely be a bottling. Arsenal fans themselves already know this, if they\u2019re honest about it, because they\u2019ve very correctly spent many years enjoying the \u2018third in a two-horse race\u2019 line about Spurs\u2019 failed challenge in 2016, a thoroughly rogue season of ludicrous Barclays when a great many of the factors outlined above allowed Arsenal\u2019s own failings to go rather under the radar. (But Stead knows, because Stead always knows.<\/strong>)<\/p>\n At the same time, it\u2019s still absolutely the case that Arsenal blowing a lead to Man City is just less bottle-jobby than if it were ever to happen the other way round.<\/p>\n <\/div>\nSize of lead<\/h2>\n
Games remaining<\/h2>\n
Strength of challenger<\/h2>\n
How much other clubs\u2019 fans hate you<\/h2>\n
Humorous or slapstick catastrophe<\/h2>\n
Kodak moment<\/h2>\n
Previous reputation for bottliness<\/h2>\n
Unexpectedness of pre-bottling situation<\/h2>\n