No easy games? Surely this one would be for Arsenal. Never before in English football history had a team endured a worse league record after 15 matches than Wolves. In any of the professional divisions. Their haul of a meagre two points gave an outline of the grimness, although by no means all of the detail.
Before kick-off, the bookmakers had Wolves at 28-1 to win; it was 8-1 for the draw. And you just had to hand it to the club’s 3,000 travelling fans who took up their full ticket allocation. There were no trains back to Wolverhampton after the game, obviously. It was a weekend. Mission impossible? This felt like the definition of it.
Yet Wolves would scrap and they would confound. For the vast majority of the occasion, it came to feel as if we were watching the shock result of the season play out. Arsenal were horribly off their game. The Premier League leaders might have cited fatigue as an excuse. It was also possible to wonder whether complacency was at work.
Mikel Arteta’s team played their trump card on 70 minutes, from a corner, naturally. Little had done for them in open play. Bukayo Saka sent over the inswinger from the right and Sam Johnstone’s world fell in. The Wolves goalkeeper misread the flight and, scrambling back, he seemed to brush the ball against the far post. Whereupon it bounced back, hit him and went in.
The crazy thing was that Rob Edwards’s visitors rebelled. They pushed in the 89th minute, the Arsenal substitute Myles Lewis-Skelly needing to make an important tackle on Tolu Arokodare, who had also come off the bench. And then it happened. When another substitute, Mateus Mané, crossed from the left, Arokodare got there first to flash a header past David Raya. The Emirates announcer gave the goal to Mané. But if he was scrambled, so was everybody.
Arsenal would find the answer, deep into stoppage time; a goal to avert disaster, to paper over the cracks. Just about. Arteta had sent on Gabriel Jesus and he challenged in front of goal when Saka crossed from the right. The ball, though, would fly in off the head of Yerson Mosquera. Another own goal; devastation for him and Wolves. The defender lay supine for what felt like an age. The relief for Arsenal was palpable.
Wolves had set an extraordinarily low bar with their performance in the 4-1 home defeat against Manchester United last Monday but even so, this was much better from them from the first whistle. The commitment was there, especially in the duels. Emmanuel Agbadou was a symbol of it, slamming the door on Viktor Gyökeres. Toti Gomes was good, too. Wolves were determined not to give up anything that could be construed as cheap.
Arsenal were terrible in the first half. So flat, so predictable. Pretty much everything in open play went through Saka on the right but try as he did and slippery as he was, he could not make it happen. Arteta’s team had only one big chance before the interval which, inevitably, came from an inswinging Declan Rice corner. Gabriel Martinelli was unmarked beyond the far post but he directed his header across goal and wide. Martinelli had two other flickers only to lack conviction.
Incredibly, the moment to quicken the pulses in the first half came at the other end when Wolves broke after repelling a 27th minute corner. Hwang Hee-chan ran from his own half with nobody bar David Raya in front of him and a posse of chasing red behind him; a cat among the pigeons. He kept on running and unloaded the shot, Raya getting down to save. Piero Hincapié did well to block from Jørgen Strand Larsen on 45 minutes after initially slipping over.
Arteta had gone as strong as possible with his lineup – no rest for many of his overexerted players – and the task was to plot a route through Edwards’s 5-3-2 system. William Saliba and Rice were back after absences and Arteta was forced into a reshuffle when Ben White, making a rare start at right-back, was forced off on the half hour. Lewis-Skelly came in at left-back and the other defenders moved along one.
With almost an hour on the clock, it was impossible to ignore the anxiety in the home seats. Was it going to be one of those nights? The sluggishness of their team was hard to explain. Arteta made a triple change, introducing Mikel Merino, Martin Ødegaard and Leandro Trossard. Off went the ineffective Martín Zubimendi, Eberechi Eze and Martinelli, the last of whom had just curled past the far post.
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• Yerson Mosquera putting through his own net was the 18th 90th-minute winning own goal in Premier League history. 33% of these have been for an Arsenal win (6/18), with two now against Wolves at the Emirates Stadium (also José Sá in February 2022).
• Wolves have now scored two own goals in a single Premier League game on three occasions, with two of those coming against Arsenal (also at Molineux in the hosts' 4-1 defeat November 2009). No side has conceded multiple own goals in more different games.
• This was the seventh time a team have scored twice in a Premier League match with both goals being own goals, and the first since Leicester lost 2-1 at Liverpool in December 2022. Opta
Arteta raged when Hwang slid into Lewis-Skelly and was booked – the manager wanted a red card, although there was not enough in it for that. It did lay bare Arteta’s mounting worries. He watched Rice go close with a free-kick and then force a fine low save out of Johnstone. The goalkeeper’s descent from potential hero to villain was stunning, the visitors’ first own goal of the night a real howler. The second brought Wolves to their knees.