With victory at West Ham, Arsenal took another big step towards winning the Premier League title. Does this result mean curtains for Manchester City’s chances?
“If Arsenal beat West Ham at the London Stadium on Sunday, they will win the Premier League title.”
Those were the words of Sky Sports’ Jamie Carragher following Manchester City’s 3-3 draw with Everton at the start of the week.
Now, after Arsenal kept up their part of the bargain with a hard-fought, nervy, dramatic and VAR-boosted 1-0 win over West Ham on Sunday afternoon, Carragher’s assessment of the situation will be put to the test.
With victory, Arsenal have taken their lead at the top of the Premier League back to five points, having seen it cut to two overnight when City beat Brentford 3-0 in Saturday’s late kick-off.
A late goal from Leandros Trossard did the job for Mikel Arteta’s side at West Ham, though they were also grateful for a stoppage-time intervention from the VAR to rule out an equaliser from Callum Wilson.
This win came away to a resurgent West Ham side who had gone six home Premier League games without defeat. It was their longest unbeaten run at home since going 15 matches without losing between September 2015 and April 2016, back when they played their games at Upton Park. It was, in other words, a major hurdle for Arsenal to navigate.
But after a monumental struggle, Arsenal have successfully made it over that hurdle, and are now just two wins away from wrapping up their first Premier League title since 2003-04.
The Opta supercomputer agrees that this was a huge step towards ending the title race. Heading into the weekend, Arsenal won the title in 86.0% of the supercomputer’s simulations of the rest of the season.
After City’s win over Brentford on Saturday, their chances dropped to 78.1%, but following the victory over West Ham on Sunday, Arsenal’s chances of winning the Premier League have gone back up to 87.2%.
That is only a marginal increase from the supercomputer’s numbers coming into the weekend. In other words, the supercomputer expected Arsenal to beat relegation-threatened West Ham, and only now considers them slightly more certain to win the title than it already did.
So, the supercomputer isn’t going quite as far as agreeing with Carragher that Arsenal will win the title having seen off West Ham, instead suggesting this was just an obstacle that they were very likely to overcome.
The supercomputer also expects that Arsenal will win their remaining games, too. They host relegated Burnley a week on Monday, before a final-day trip to Selhurst Park to play a Crystal Palace side who will be almost entirely distracted by their first major European final, which takes place just a few days later when they play Rayo Vallecano in the Conference League final in Leipzig. Arsenal are understandably huge favourites to win both of those games.
And if they do so, they will end their 22-year wait to be crowned champions of England once again.
The title race certainly isn’t over yet. There was a major twist on Monday night when City slipped up at Everton and there was very nearly another but for the VAR review at the London Stadium on Sunday afternoon.
But that said, if Arsenal were going to slip up, this felt like the game they would do so in. After beating West Ham, they are extremely close to wrapping up the title.
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