Last Sunday I watched Arsenal’s win over Chelsea. Sky had Patrick Vieira, Kolo Toure and Emanuel Petit as guests. Thierry Henry was pictured high in the stands presumably on some kind of contractual exile given he’s a TNT pundit. Slightly saggier and more tired looking than in their playing days, it was like a reunion of veterans from English football’s aesthetic wars of the early 2000s.

Afterwards Vieira, Toure and Petit unpicked Arsenal’s win which was bludgeoned from two robust corner routines. At times it felt like asking three Michaelangelos to comment on the austere beauty of Soviet era brutalist architecture. There’s a beauty in there somewhere, but they’re old and their eyesight is failing so they couldn’t see it.

The backlash against Arsenal has been constant; a video of the players coming off the pitch and disrespectfully ‘ignoring’ Petit went viral. In truth, Petit, a greying middle-aged man, was standing amongst probably twenty other middle-aged men and was easy to miss. Others have commented on how boring and ugly they are with their focus on set pieces. One pundit even joked (I assume) that they didn’t deserve to receive the Premier League trophy.

And yet, at the same time, they’re also accused of being anxious chokers who are constantly on the verge of capitulation. If that’s true, perhaps they’re justified in taking a risk free approach to the title. Despite all these apparent failings, they’re miles ahead of everyone else, so it’s working. It’s almost a co-ordinated smear campaign.

Football always works in cycles, the antidote for one style is often an equal and opposite. When the Spanish ruled the waves with tika taka, the Germans counteracted with high energy gegenpressing. When Manchester City suffocate everyone with possession, Arsenal bypass them with direct balls into the box.

The physical game that’s in its primacy now doesn’t help position football as an entertainment format. Sky called our visit to Preston on Friday night the ‘opening to the Championship weekend’ like we were Paloma Faith doing pre-match entertainment at the FA Vase final.

There was no disguising the reality; we were a schedule filler given there was the FA Cup, Six Nations and Paralympic Games on terrestrial channels. The stands at Deepdale were virtually empty, the pitch patchy and sodden and we had an opponent whose sponsor is *squints* SpudBros; a jacket potato ‘brand’. If we’re preparing for life back in League One, the evening was useful exposure therapy. 

The narrative thread was slender; Preston had a huge opportunity to continue their pursuit of mid-table nothingness. A win would see them continue to be Preston until the end of the season when they would regroup and attempt to be Preston next season. There was also a subplot; Will Lankshear, Jamie Donley and Alfie Devine all come from Spurs and, well, Spurs are too big to go down, aren’t they? Oh, and a win for us would see us out of the bottom three, but nobody believed that was possible. Sky’s supercomputer – a MacBook Pro with stickers on it – calculated our chances of survival as 25%.

The tone of the game was set early; we retreated into our own half like a group of ramblers settling into the warm safety of a snug bar in a country pub. Every now and then Stan Mills and Miles Peart-Harris would pop out and attempt to break free, but they were so isolated and the pitch was so sticky, their only hope was to alleviate the pressure for a few moments before it returned.

Our possession stats were discarded as we absorbed what was left of the atmosphere in our defensive sponge. After five minutes it dried out completely when Cameron Brannagan launched a free-kick from inside our half, Michal Helik struggled, wrestled and scuffed his way beyond Lewis Gibson to somehow shin the ball over David Cornell for 1-0.

Ciaron Brown should have scored a second before Milutin Osmajic, unmarked, headed in a looping cross for the equaliser. While it was hard to imagine Preston going on the rampage, the goal had a familiar ring about it. The commentary team discussed our inevitable second half collapse, I contemplated the benefits of a point, convincing myself that it could even be better than taking all three.

All this ignored that we were offering a constant attacking threat. Rather than a carefully constructed offensive strategy, it was a brutal bludgeoning. Donley and Lankshear both had chances, while Mills occupied their defensive line with breaks out of defence. Everything was clouded in a thick fog of glorious grit and ugliness. 

Like Arsenal pursuing their first title for twenty years, an unlikely survival bid offers a huge licence to focus on results. Gone is the front-foot experimentation of the Norwich game, now it’s all about balls in the box to big men and picking up scraps of chances. It may not appeal to outsiders, but there’s a refreshing honesty about it when it’s your team.

Eight minutes into the second half Sam Long launched another huge cross onto Michal Helik’s head which bounced out to Stan Mills. Mills smashed it like he was trying to hit a pigeon who’d flown into his kitchen with a frying pan. The ball careered through a crowd of players, Lankshear stuck a foot out and it crept in the bottom left-hand corner. Lankshear theatrically claimed it, but there was some debate about whether he got a touch; first it was a foot, then a toe, then his studs, eventually, we concluded it’d deflected off the concept of Will Lankshear.

Brannagan, Long, Helik; the survival boys from last season were back, Matt Bloomfield had unlocked a new level of ugly. Christ Makosso’s tardiness, which allowed Helik his place against West Brom, might be the most valuable piece of poor timekeeping in history. On the hour; a long throw, obviously, a flick on from Helik, obviously, and Ciaron Brown prods home, obviously; it’s three. 

Through the gloom and the dank, a light flickers on, Preston offer no response, it doesn’t take much to bend teams like them to our will when their season’s petering out as ours gets more desperate and our objectives more binary. We have nothing to lose, they have nothing to gain, wrestle the impetus and suddenly there are points to be had. 

On the Dub last week, Jerome Sale suggested we only needed six wins from our last 12 games to survive, this overlooked that our first six wins took nearly three times as many games to achieve. That said, if he’s right, we’re now down to four and that seems more achievable. More importantly, we seem to have learned that ugly and functional has its own beauty while those around us are still blaming each other for their predicament. We’re not safe yet, but we’re not done either.