The mundanity of life can beat anyone down. The daily struggles, trails and tribulations of life is enough to make anyone lethargic and nonchalant. Simple things in life can become difficult and even enjoying your passions can feel like a chore.
Winter months, long working hours, not enough pay, the cost of living, all these things and more can make life feel grey and bland. Social media attempts to drain our attention span just to sell us targeted ads, and strangers can be vicious just because you tried to get on the tube.
It is no surprise that after all this we can find ourselves watching games, not because we want to, but purely just going through the motions of trying to support your team. Laid back, not paying attention, texting in the group chat about something irrelevant or even scrolling through social media.
That’s why games like this one stick out so hard. They reach out and grab you, slap you across the face, pour a bucket of ice cold water over your head and remind you how it feels to be alive again.
When Declan Rice nodded home Martin Odegaards beautifully weighted cross to win Arsenal the game against Luton at Kenilworth Road, I lost my voice. I was jumping up and down in my bedroom screaming my lungs out with pure joy. Two hours before this I was fighting the urge to fall asleep.
All these emotions will have been felt from both sides of this game. The resilience shown from Luton to equalise twice, the hope that the stadium was filled with when Ross Barkley took the lead for them, the nervous wreck they became clinging on to a point, and the abject disappointment when they finally lost.
The beauty of football is you never know where these games are going to come from, Arsenal sit top of the Premier League and have just topped their Champions League group with a game to spare, whilst Luton fought their way through the playoffs just for the right to call themselves a Premier League team, for the first time in their history, and currently sit in the relegation zone.
Even so, this game provided all the emotional range that you can come to expect from the beautiful game.
In an era where everything has to be quantified and commercialised, where everyone is fighting your attention to monetise it, it is nice to have moment where, for that fleeting 90 minutes, nothing else in the world matters.
In these moments we realise that football really is not a matter of life or death. It’s so much more than that.
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