Stoke City vs Arsenal: A clash of distinctive styles

Arsenal in full flow

It’s true. What you’re about to read won’t say a word about Ramsey or Shawcross—well, except that bit right there. Sorry. It’s hard to point what you’re not going to talk about without, you know, talking about it.

It’s a bit of a paradox, maybe hypocrisy, akin to saying to someone, “I’m not talking to you” when, just by saying so, you are. Enough with the folderol, both of the sort you’ve just read and of the sort we’ve likely all been reading in the lead-up to Saturday’s match. From this point forward, you won’t see the words “Ramsey” or “Shawcross” once more. Okay. This point forward. What we have on our hands is less football match than sociological endeavor, one that pits more than two football sides—it’s more like a sequel to The Hunger Games.

In it, we’re the residents of the lavish Capitol, complete with our effete, urbane fashions, frou-frou foods, and sissified morals. The Potters, then, are denizens of one the backwater, hardscrabble districts. It plays out an old, old tension between the urban and the rural, made all the more of a parody by the styles each club plays.

On one hand, Arsenal play an aesthetically “pleasing” style consisting of intricate passing and balletic movement, performed by spritely, elvish middies who scamper and flit about the ball. On the other, Stoke play a more-rugged style, involving aggressive tackles and long-balls delivered by oafish lummoxes who are just as happy to run through an opponent as they are to score a goal—maybe even more so.

It’s all a bit reductive, isn’t it? Sure, Arsenal are famous or infamous for that style, just as Stoke is with theirs. However, each style has become a straw-man for the other side to knock down. Each side now serves as a scapegoat for the other’s frustrations. The two individual men involved, conveniently, play their roles. Ours is dapper, dashing even; theirs is gangly and looming. Both then serve as the villain against whom fans can fulminate, venting their deepest frustrations on two who arguably deserve better from their opponent’s supporters.

That, however, is probably a bridge too far to cross. So intense and so ingrained have the emotions become that it’s hard to imagine a past without it. Some kind of catharsis is needed, some kind of emotional purge that will allow fans on either side to remember that this, after all, only a game, and such games were meant to allow culture-clashes to be settled without outright war or bloodshed.

As tempting and as emotionally satisfying as it may feel to continue to nurse that bloodlust, wishing ill on certain players, segments of fans, even entire towns (as some have done), that strips us all of a little something that separates from our more-primitive forebears whether we reside in Stoke or London. At some point, we’ll have to realize that it is just a game, and the villainy we ascribe to our perceived enemies exists largely in our own fevered imaginations.

Having said all of this, I hope you don’t mistake me for some kind of namby-pamby. I hope we run roughshod over Stoke on Saturday with goals galore. I want to see us keep a clean sheet and bag a half-dozen goals. Not because I hate Stoke. There are three points available, three points that will go a long way in our title-tilt.

So I say without spite or enmity, goals, Gunners. Goals from all directions. A Giroud header. A pornogol di Wilshere. Two from Tomáš. One from Vermaelen, yes, for old time’s sake. Maybe, for good measure, one from Sanogo to open his account. Again, none of this comes from hatred of Stoke. It’s just business, and I hope we take care of ours on Saturday.