After prevailing in a gristly physical ballet with Chelsea, Arsenal’s season has now reached a point of pre-ignition

Zamina mina. Waka, waka, hé-hé. By the end of this gruelling, bruising, deep tissue ache of a football match, it felt as though the opening 96 minutes had been staged simply as an extended tease for a startlingly carefree final 30 seconds.

Up to that point Arsenal and Chelsea had produced something that felt like the football equivalent of having your eyes descaled with a wire brush. This was a dense, gristly kind of physical ballet. Johan Cruyff once said that in football the clock is never your friend. It’s either moving too fast or too slowly. Here the clock didn’t really seem to move at all, or to be going backwards. The clock hated everyone.

A robotic team fuelled by data and scrutinised relentlessly in a climate of angst and rage feels like a digital-age metaphor

Like most people who have no talent for business ideas, I have a huge number of highly promising business ideas always on the go, ideas that are available for investment from any passing billionaire or Dragons’ Den rainmaker type.

Not one of the A-listers, obviously. I’m not insane. Not a Meaden or a Paphitis. But perhaps one of the minor ones, some strangely groomed South African retail magnate called Dork van Frotwangle who looks as if he keeps a bag of human fingers in his freezer and will mysteriously disappear mid-series and never be mentioned again.