Is “perpetual crisis” the new norm for Arsenal?

Here is a great question as you prepare to watch (or DVR) today’s Monday’s EPL special – a match between two clubs that haven’t been much of that this year. Special, that is.

Arsenal makes the short trip west of London to meet Reading (a short match preview is here), the club currently holding the dubious distinction as 20^th among 20 clubs in the Barclay’s Premier League.

Arsenal, meanwhile, is 8^th. There’s certainly no relegation danger afoot – but you might not know so by listening to some of the sky-is-falling sentiment reverberating around the stately and modern Emirates today.  For the storied likes of Arsenal, 8^th may as well be 20^th.

The trophy drought – that’s a word we see with increasing frequency around Arsenal and embattled manager Arsene Wenger – reaches back to 2005. The volume of rancor grows annually.

And woven into those previous two sentences is the question to be pondered here. Because Wenger isn’t really “embattled” so much as he is “perennially embattled” these days. And that volume, at some point, simply cannot grow any louder.

Arsenal meets Reading at 3 p.m. ET on ESPN2. Between then and now, consider Jacob Steinberg’s premise from this UK piece in The Guardian:

It’s difficult to know where to begin with Arsenal, a team so perpetually in crisis that there will surely come a point where the crisis is no longer a crisis, but merely the norm. There’s a philosophical poser for you, all right: a crisis can only last so long before everyone’s used to the mediocrity and they’re not angry, they’re just tired. Although they probably will be quite angry if they contrive to lose to Reading, a team so useless that they managed to Arsenal up a four-goal lead against Arsenal the other week …

That was a reference to an absurd 7-5 verdict back in October, when Arsenal beat back a four-goal deficit to prevail in a Capital One Cup contest.

Just for hoots, where are all 12 goals in that one:

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