Mikel Arteta after Sunday’s win against Everton

SUPERSTITION is a funny thing, defying any reasonable logic. It ridicules you whether it be lucky socks, avoiding the cracks in the pavement or some other repetitive ritual with which you can single-handedly change the course of history for hundreds of thousands of other people watching the same event.

There can’t be many occasions, however, where a whole newspaper column has vanished under these auspices of curse and fortune.

After years of writing a slot on this page which essentially found – I’d say creative, but others would call plodding – ways to say Arsenal are better than Spurs, the typewriter fell silent at the start of January when I broke my arm in what has felt like a hundred places. Somebody with a voodoo doll up White Hart Lane way helped divert a hire scooter’s wheels into a drain and from then on the closest I would be getting to the Emirates Stadium was the view from the Whittington Hospital.

By the time I could type again, Arsenal had transformed their faltering late autumn edition into credible title challengers.

Every game I missed appeared to be a party, every missing article on this page appeared to guarantee three points.

And so, as the weekends passed and by the laws of superstition and fate, it became obvious that Arsenal were relying on me to see the greater good and not write another column.

I don’t expect a medal or even a word of thanks from any of you, but courageously I played my part in the club’s mesmer­ising run to the brink of the Premier League title. It felt daring to even attend a game when I returned to the press box away at Brighton.

The hallucination described above really is the genuine reason there has been no “love him, hate him, read him” in your weekly paper, but sadly if we have learned anything from the past six, seven years it must be what follows.

You can dutifully meet all the once common requirements to be Premier League champions – have a brilliant team, win lots of matches and not wear any of the clothes you were wearing when Nayim scored from the halfway line – but there will always be Manchester City in the way at the end.

Richard Osley gets patched up at the Whittington

And so it was again that the best Arsenal team since the Invincibles fell just short on Sunday against the soulless machine which City has become.

Four league titles in a row has at least meant more people on television footnoting the 115 financial conduct charges levelled at the monster.

It’s only when people stop telling Liverpool and Arsenal that they have bottled title races of recent years and collectively demand a competitive division that things have hope of changing.

The current course of action is to simply credit Pep Guardiola as being a Godlike manager, without ever mentioning the ugly way the City project has been constructed.

Each week on Match of the Day, Alan Shearer would repeatedly tell us things that were eminently believable were in fact “unbelievable”.

It must at least be a happy place of wonder and awe if you are endlessly surprised that a team manufactured with generational spending will score great goals and win most matches.

Unbelievable – well, Gary, unbelievable actually means controlling Arsenal’s fate by breaking an arm and not writing your newspaper column for several months.

Part of a club having success is that whispered, begrudging respect you win from rivals: the honesty with which I can write that Ryan Giggs’s hairy-chest semi-final goal was spectacular, Jurgen Klopp is an entertaining chap and that Harry Kane’s talent deserves more than an Audi Cup medal. The truth with City is that people see them at the top and see no real achievement, and move onto the other 19 teams.

This all brings us to the sunny events of Sunday afternoon. There was no trophy, no championship to toast – but there was pride and respect for the Arsenal team of 2024 which beat nearly everybody and stayed undefeated against all of England’s traditional superpowers.

And this spilled out onto the streets for a last day party from Crouch End to the Angel, Camden Town to Clissold Park where everybody in north London seemed to be wearing red again. There were brass bands, smoky flares and warm beer in plastic cups. It could never be the last scene in Fever Pitch but nevertheless it was a comforting coming together of old friends united in their enthusiasm for Saliba, Odegaard, Rice and Saka.

Maybe it never really was close, maybe City will just win and win and win again, maybe we were celebrating Arsene Wenger’s old “top four” cup too vividly.

But this has been a season of beautiful afternoons and evenings, and here was the support in love with the team once more.