Chased down by serial winners, Arsenal’s race is finally run | Nick Ames

The effort required to compete with Manchester City caught up with Mikel Arteta’s side in their defeat at Nottingham Forest

In recent months Mikel Arteta has, on occasion, brought a young olive tree into team meetings. It resembles a bigger equivalent that stands outside the manager’s office, whose occupant cites it as a club symbol and an exemplar of the need for sound roots. On a warm mid-May evening, Arsenal’s title pretensions were finally lost in the forest: it was the Tricky Trees, nourished by a relentlessly positive home environment, who handed Manchester City the most bloodless of triumphs while guaranteeing their own survival.

Such a low-key coronation befits what this title race ultimately became: City, operating at a consistent high-tempo purr with which nobody else can live, are lusciously accomplished serial winners who nonetheless fail to warm the blood of many neutrals. Arsenal, whose polarity between giddying highs and plunging lows is still that little bit too pronounced, could not keep up but it is hard to imagine a side that could. Arteta will privately have hated such a flat day’s work but he has created a team of vast potential whose point, in finishing second, remains well stated.