Leah Williamson picked up the football.
That is an entirely unremarkable sentence until you add the small detail that the ball was apparently live, Misa Rodríguez had just passed it to her from a goal kick, and Arsenal were protecting a lead in the 87th minute of a Champions League match.
Paris FC were given a penalty. Maeline Mendy scored it. Arsenal, who were 2-0 up, drew 2-2.
There are sophisticated ways to analyse football, but then there are moments when two experienced international footballers accidentally manufacture a penalty from a situation where almost nothing is happening.
It was that sort of night.
Unfortunately for Arsenal, Manchester City are next.
The reigning WSL champions welcome Renée Slegers’ side to the Etihad Stadium on Sunday afternoon with four wins from four league games. Arsenal have five points from the same number of matches, sit seven behind City and have scored twice in the league. A defeat would turn that gap into ten points after five games.
Nobody sensible declares a title race finished in October.
Football supporters are not required to be sensible.
Arsenal arrive carrying rather a lot of baggage
The peculiar thing about Arsenal’s start is that they haven’t generally resembled a terrible football team.
That might actually be making everyone angrier.
They had 19 attempts against Chelsea and lost 1-0. They had another 17 against Paris FC and surrendered a two-goal advantage. In the WSL, a squad containing Alessia Russo, Mariona Caldentey, Olivia Smith, Chloe Kelly, Georgia Stanway and various other people rather accomplished at kicking footballs has produced two goals in four games.
This was supposed to be the season when excuses became harder to locate. Seven major summer arrivals strengthened a squad already expected to challenge for trophies, while Slegers had something managers of elite women’s teams have barely experienced recently: an uninterrupted pre-season without a major international tournament immediately beforehand.
Instead, every Arsenal match currently feels slightly overexamined.
A misplaced pass becomes evidence. A substitution becomes a referendum. A draw becomes a crisis meeting conducted simultaneously by thousands of people on their phones.
Slegers missing the post-match media duties in Paris because she was too emotional only added another ingredient. She has since said she feels supported by Arsenal’s hierarchy and insists the squad remains strongly united.
Both things can be true.
Arsenal can remain together internally while supporters outside become increasingly irritated by what they are watching.
This often happens when expensive football teams stop winning.
Alessia Russo finally has her goal
Amid the nonsense in Paris, Arsenal desperately needed something.
Alessia Russo scored.
A neat exchange with former City midfielder Georgia Stanway ended with Russo putting Arsenal ahead shortly before half-time, finally opening her account for 2026/27 and taking her European career tally to 19.
It mattered because Alessia Russo’s early stats this season have looked strangely bare. Arsenal’s problems are considerably broader than their centre-forward, but strikers occupy that peculiar footballing profession where an entire performance can apparently be diagnosed by whether the ball crossed a line.
Russo has already demonstrated enough across her Arsenal and England career for one dry spell not to require an archaeological investigation. She was one of Arsenal’s standout performers last season and remains a central figure in their attack.
And, because football searches occasionally take us somewhere more interesting, is Alessia Russo half Italian?
Not quite. Russo was born in Maidstone and represents England, but her father’s side of the family is Italian. Her grandfather Alfonso emigrated from Aragona in Sicily to England in the 1950s. Russo has spoken about childhood summers spent with that side of her family, playing football on Italian beaches and learning some of the language.
Those wanting Alessia Russo Instagram photographs or Alessia Russo stats will inevitably find rather more glamorous evidence of her career.
On Sunday, Arsenal need something simpler.
They need their number nine receiving the ball somewhere useful.
Meanwhile, Bunny Shaw continues being Bunny Shaw
City have the opposite problem.
Very little currently looks unusual.
Khadija Shaw has four WSL goals already and scored City’s equaliser against Real Madrid on Thursday. Yui Hasegawa helped create it by forcing the turnover; Shaw received the ball inside the area and finished.
All terribly efficient.
Shaw began the league season with two goals against Birmingham and has continued doing what she did most of last season: making defenders’ afternoons considerably less pleasant.
Against Madrid, City even received the little piece of fortune teams in good form tend to accumulate.
Silvia Cristóbal appeared to score an 89th-minute winner for Real, only for it to be disallowed after the referee had collided with Beth Mead during the build-up. City escaped with a 1-1 draw and remain unbeaten in Europe after also drawing 2-2 away at Bayern Munich.
City supporters can therefore look towards Sunday with the pleasant suspicion that their team will probably function.
Arsenal supporters are wondering whether somebody might pick up another goal-kick.
These are quite different psychological environments.
Georgia Stanway goes back to Manchester
Then there is Stanway.
Football loves a returning-player narrative because it saves everyone the inconvenience of inventing one.
Stanway spent seven years with Manchester City, scoring 67 goals in 186 appearances before leaving for Bayern Munich. She returned to England this summer with Arsenal and now walks back into the Etihad wearing red.
More importantly, she arrives having scored against Paris FC.
Stanway has dismissed suggestions of an Arsenal dressing-room crisis as “a myth”, which is presumably the correct response when people outside a workplace begin diagnosing the emotional state of everyone inside it.
Her midfield battle could matter far more than the reunion photographs.
Kim Little remains fundamental to Arsenal’s control, while Hasegawa provides City with the sort of intelligent midfield presence that rarely produces spectacular compilations but repeatedly leaves opponents wondering why their passing lanes have disappeared. Arsenal’s control noticeably deteriorated after Little was withdrawn in Paris.
Against City, those small structural losses become dangerous quickly.
Particularly when Shaw is waiting.
The Etihad has become a fairly unpleasant place to visit
City have won 14 consecutive WSL home matches.
That is the sort of statistic that eventually develops its own mythology. Players are still playing football on grass, obviously, but streaks acquire weight because everyone keeps discussing them until opponents begin carrying them onto the pitch themselves.
This match has also been moved from the Joie Stadium to the Etihad, one of two WSL fixtures City scheduled there this season.
It gives Sunday’s match an appropriately sized stage.
City currently resemble Mechagodzilla wandering through the early WSL season: engineered, heavy, faintly terrifying and seemingly equipped with another weapon whenever the previous one fails.
Shaw doesn’t score? Lauren Hemp might.
Hemp doesn’t? Aoba Fujino can attack from wide areas.
Then there is Hasegawa controlling midfield and Alex Greenwood organising behind them.
Arsenal have plenty of comparable individual quality. The difference is that theirs currently looks like a collection of expensive components spread across the workshop floor while somebody searches for the instruction manual.
In theory, everything required is there.
Theory has had an excellent season for Arsenal so far.
Manchester City vs Arsenal Women is really a test of mood
Perhaps that is what makes Sunday fascinating.
City don’t need this match to prove they are good. Four league victories, the championship trophy sitting somewhere in Manchester and an unbeaten European start have already supplied enough evidence.
Arsenal need something.
Not necessarily a masterpiece. Not even something you can breathlessly label a “statement”.
Just evidence that the machinery still works.
Russo scoring in Paris helps. Stanway getting her first Arsenal goal helps. A strong performance at the Etihad would help considerably more.
Because football crises are peculiar things. Sometimes they are genuine structural problems. Sometimes they are three disappointing results standing on each other’s shoulders wearing a long coat.
Nobody really knows which Arsenal have yet.
Sunday should tell us a little more.
