Manchester City should celebrate Arsenal win and pundits should remember emotions count

It was a great weekend for Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and fans up and down the country, as having hit form at the right time in the 2025/26 Premier League campaign, they ticked off the first real milestone in this year’s chase for the title.

Despite the points gap to top that had been built up by Arsenal and Mikel Arteta, City have plugged away and slowly but consistently clawed their way back into the title race for a number of weeks and months.

With Arsenal choking against Bournemouth, the head-to-head at the Etihad Stadium in last Sunday’s clash became all important, and for those with access to the betting offers on BestBettingBonuses.co.uk will definitely be using them now given the current trend.

In a 2-1 victory to close the gap to only three points, it is really ‘advantage Guardiola‘ again as Arteta has also seen his side lose to the Sky Blues in the League Cup Final, Southampton in the FA Cup, and the aforementioned Cherries.

Momentum is again of a sky blue persuasion, and mental anguish and physical fear of again blowing a good lead, and the Premier League trophy is squarely resting with the North London side.

There are a number of games still to play though and Manchester City fans will now be expecting a reaction from the Gunners, and they could well take victory in their remaining five matches and win them all straight.

Should they do that, City simply have to match them result by result and the outstanding game in hand from the postponed Crystal Palace clash becomes all important. Obviously from a slightly different mental and pressure point of view, in some senses it may hand City an amount of wriggle room to proverbially catch up. For Arsenal, a further and additional slip up simply magnifies the existing tensions that surround bottling it for yet another season.

At this point, on a goal difference front, there is only one between the teams, but with City’s notable better form over the course of the last six matches, a fair educated guess with an additional match to play would suggest City would quickly take advantage even in that metric.

Given the stick City players have received for their celebrations at the full time whistle against Arsenal, fans are probably hoping the Gunners fall further off the pace and utterly implode, as if City do again lift the title after a big summer of change, the celebrations will be electric given the serial winning stalwarts that moved on.

Should that happen, there could well be a couple of well-known pundits who would struggle to cope given they appeared to be incapable of understanding what the victory meant to the players – especially those new to the club and now knowing their first real Premier League title is almost in their hands.

Football is all about emotion, and Video Assistant Referees have taken enough of it out of the game already.