5 Truths: Arsenal must challenge for the Premier League next season

On an evening when they became the first team to win the FA Cup 12 times, Arsenal produced a mesmeric, brilliant display which near enough compels them to make a proper fist of extending their league tally next season. This was one of those classic Arsenal performances – full of intuitive pass-and-move football of the future – which makes you wonder why they haven’t won the league for almost a decade, before you remember all the reasons: the injury crises, the glaring holes in the squad and, most prominently, the capacity for bottling it on the big stage. But as you watched Santi Cazorla and Mesut Ozil run rings around an anaemic Aston Villa, toying with their opponents, and Arsenal construct move after move of pure passing pleasure before Alexis Sanchez thumped home another screamer, you were bewitched again.

Have they turned a corner, finally? Repeated false dawns would indicate caution is the best way to proceed, but this is an Arsenal team which has definitely changed, even if only slightly. Since the turn of the year their inherent tendency towards catastrophe has been subdued, bar the Champions League defeat to Monaco. They have stood up to challenges against rivals for league position and where last season’s FA Cup final defeat to Hull was an occasion to fray the nerves, a fraught and gritty comeback which laid bare their enduring insecurities, this was a joyous procession once Theo Walcott had fired home the opener, an occasion to showcase their technical superiority, even if it came against a desperate Aston Villa team.

As always with Arsenal, it is not the technical side of their game which is in dispute, and it will take an upgrade in a number of positions to give Wenger a squad capable of getting close to Chelsea, but after a performance of this confidence and gusto the excuses are running out: next season a title challenge must be on the cards. FA Cup glory is glory indeed, but players like Ozil and the spectacular Sanchez, who lit up Wembley with a scorching second goal, need to operate on the highest of plains. Arsenal probably won’t win the league next season – history shows us that – but they have to push Chelsea all the way. Anything less with a team this talented would be criminal.

As much as this match exposed a gulf in class between two teams, it also highlighted the huge disparity between the two bosses in what was a managerial mismatch of epic proportions. Arsene Wenger, who has managed Arsenal for well over 1,000 matches, got his big decisions right, with the deployment of Theo Walcott instead of Olivier Giroud disrupting and unsettling Aston Villa’s defence, who continued to use a rather high line against the pacy forward. Walcott scored the opening goal and could have had a couple more in the first half, fully justifying his inclusion after his hat-trick against West Brom on the final day of the season.

Sherwood, meanwhile, who has managed in fewer than 50 games in his career, opted to sacrifice Leandro Bacuna– a player who has had such a big hand in Christian Benteke’s renaissance – at right-back to bring in Alan Hutton, who soon did what Alan Hutton does and went around kicking people. In truth, most teams would have struggled against Arsenal in this form, with Francis Coquelin impeccable in midfield and Cazorla and Ozil enjoying themselves with some audacious moments ahead of him – but this was a chastening experience for Sherwood and his team, who failed to get Jack Grealish into the match and resorted to trying to knock it long to Benteke for long periods. Sherwood isn’t as clueless as the sarcasm-laden nickname of ‘Tactics Tim’ suggests, but a man who claimed to have spotted “areas where they are weak” could only watch as Arsenal passed their way around his team, his face dropping on the sidelines as the second, third and fourth went in.

While Sherwood was left surveying the damage inflicted on Villa, Wenger made his own piece of FA Cup history to go with that of his team when collecting his sixth FA Cup – equaling Aston Villa’s own George Ramsay who reached that tally in 1920. At Arsenal, Herbert Chapman, George Allison and Tom Whittaker managed one each in the pre-modern era, as did 1971 double winner Bertie Mee as he led Arsenal into the roaring seventies, with Terry Neill seeing them out with another victory in 1979. George Graham triumphed once in the FA Cup, in 1991, giving Arsenal six victories via six managers in a period spanning 61 years. Then came Wenger, his reign taking in three decades in itself, who has won as many FA Cups as of all his predecessors combined. A day of vindication for the Arsenal boss.

Putting the ball away remains football’s most valued ability, though keeping it out is technically just as useful. Passing it, meanwhile, has decidedly been in vogue for the best part of a decade, but what of actually winning it? Few players in the Premier League are as adept at doing just that as Francis Coquelin, the coiled spring in Arsenal’s midfield who pings into action at just the right moments to snatch possession away from unsuspecting opponents. Coquelin throws himself around the deep recesses of midfield, intercepting and tackling with alacrity, and distributes the ball intelligently too, his technique a legacy of his Arsenal upbringing. Wenger was right when he said only weeks ago: “If we had bought Coquelin at Christmas for £40m, everyone would say ‘What a signing!’ I am sorry he didn’t cost any money, (but) he is still a good player.”

The nature of his return from a loan spell at Charlton means he is vastly undervalued. What first seemed a pleasant fluke – his accidental excellence in the holding position – has become an unassailable feature of this team. The received wisdom is that Arsenal need to sign a defensive midfielder this summer – not 30 seconds after jumping on a tube you could hear Arsenal fans bemoan the lack of a “mean, horrible bastard” in their engine room – but Coquelin instills respect and no little fear in his own quiet way. If he had arrived for £40m in the winter, no one would even be asking the question whether Arsenal need an upgrade in his position.

All eyes were trained on the reputed boy wonder – the playmaker with the sloppy sock discipline of Thomas Mueller and, according to Gabby Agbonlahor at least, the movement of Andres Iniesta – but this was a difficult afternoon for the future of English/Irish football. Grealish’s international destiny is not decided, though it would not take the lovechild of Mystic Meg and Russell Grant to predict he wants to wear an England shirt, and this appearance at England’s home stadium did not match up to his excellent showing in the semi-final win over Liverpool. On that occasion he had a hand in both Villa goals. Here, nominally positioned on the left, Grealish didn’t get much joy from the impressive, marauding Hector Bellerin and when moving infield he lost possession all too easily as he was hounded by Arsenal’s midfield corps. He was on the periphery of an undistinguished Aston Villa performance, to say the least.

If this is to be Wojciech Szczesny’s goodbye then it will be a pleasant note on which to end a curious Arsenal career. Sidelined  despite being first choice last season as Lukasz Fabianski continued cup duties against Hull City, this season it was Szczesny who was forced to nervously wait and hope Wenger did not cast aside the man who had played in previous rounds. When the team sheets arrived, David Ospina was duly on the bench and so Szczesny, who has not seen a minute of Premier League action since being accused of smoking in the showers against Southampton on New Year’s Day, finally had his moment at Wembley. It was an authoritative performance when called upon, but ultimately he could stand back and admire the work of his team-mates. The man who once seemed capable of donning the No. 1 shirt for years could be off in the summer with reports continuing to link the club with Petr Cech, his early promise having somewhat evaporated. But if he does depart, he at least does so with an FA Cup win under his belt.