Arsenal fans riled by the Groundhog Day repetitions of the past few years have at least been treated to something more immediate before Saturday’s FA Cup final against Chelsea. Faced with the prospect of another tangle with Diego Costa, Arsenal’s centre-backs have been cutting straight to the chase. Shkodran Mustafi is concussed. Laurent Koscielny has been sent off and banned. Gabriel got in there early with his injured knee. Entering the Diego Zone? They are way ahead of you.
Arsenal have generally seen the best and the worst of Costa during three seasons of mischief and fury in the Premier League, a centre-forward who does not so much play on the edge as appear at times to be completely unaware the edge exists in the first place. Even at full strength, successive Wenger-issue centre-halves have been bruised and bullied through a head-to-head record of three kidney-punching defeats and a single, ultimately fruitless, victory last September, the 3-0 win at the Emirates that acted as a spark for Chelsea’s title charge.
Even when Costa does not score he has tended to dominate these occasions. As he did most memorably while reeling in Gabriel at Stamford Bridge last season, Arsenal’s Brazilian sent off for retaliating to provocation and left wandering off in tears, gulping for air, like a prize trout hooked, landed and ready to be put out of his misery against the harbour wall.
Most recently Costa was involved in all three Chelsea goals in the 3-1 win at Stamford Bridge in February, the last of them a kind of “scare-assist”, as Costa ran towards Petr Cech more in hope then expectation. Spooked, Cech panicked and scuffed the ball straight to Cesc Fàbregas.
Chuck in the chance this could yet turn into a bravura farewell for Chelsea’s chief goal-sicario, and it is hard not to fear for a slightly makeshift Arsenal backline. Per Mertesacker has made six starts in the league since he was traumatised by Costa at the Emirates a year and a half ago. Mertesacker could yet find himself wheeled out from the start at the heart of a four-man defence.
Alongside him the promising Rob Holding will come into the game as yet unharmed by the ogre of Stamford Bridge. Holding made a fine show of keeping the similarly powerful Romelu Lukaku quiet last weekend. Costa, though, is a challenge unlike any other, the most brutally effective, emotionally and physically bruising forward player of the past three seasons.
For how much longer though? Talk of a move to Tianjin Quanjian in the summer has eased off a little in the past week, with the Chinese club making a few pursed and pointed comments about not being asked to pay “premium prices” by European agents (China, meet Jorge. Jorge, China).
Costa has seemed a little restless for a while. He is a high-mileage battering ram these days, those twanging hamstrings wrenched through four league title races across five hard seasons in Spain and England. Costa’s rise from Brazil’s small-town interior has its own improbable qualities. It is not hard to see how he might be tempted by the chance to enrich himself even further on another new frontier.
One thing is certain. If Wembley really is the end for Costa after two league titles, 57 goals, almost 400 fouls and a relentlessly shrill concatenation of outrage, he could not have chosen a better opponent. For Arsenal Costa is not just a menace. He is also the one that got away, a failure of recruitment made all the more galling by the fact no player in the league embodies better what this mannered, orderly late-Wenger team have needed.
Arsenal first tried to sign Costa in the summer of 2013. A £30m-plus buyout clause put them off. Yaya Sanogo arrived instead. Nicklas Bendtner was retained for another year. More recently Costa’s price tag has been spent on Danny Welbeck and Lucas Pérez combined, arguably the definition of a false economy. There is a fair chance Arsenal would have won the league at least once in the past three years had Costa come to the Emirates, bringing with him what this team have palpably lacked, a little raggedness, a little of that horrible, needling street-warrior spirit.
And not just that either. One reason Chelsea may want to hang on to Costa is the difficulty of replacing his all-round game. For all his theatricality Costa is also a wonderful footballer. His movement is exceptional, not only in sniffing out the kind of goalscoring spaces that set Fàbregas’s radar twitching but in his ability to sprint long distances, carry the ball, hound defenders and generally pull his team forward in his wake.
A feature of Chelsea in the Costa years has been the spectacle of their lone centre-forward scrabbling about surrounded with the ball at his feet, and scoring exactly the kind of breakaway goal that turned the 3-1 win at Manchester City last December, where Costa produced arguably the outstanding individual attacking performance of the domestic season.
He is a gladiator in these moments and a relentless contributor to the cause. No other centre-forward has made anywhere near as many dribbles. No player at a top-six club has had as many crosses and shots or made anywhere near as many clearances, or laid on more assists than Costa’s seven while playing as a centre-forward.
Plus there is the strange dark energy that distinguishes Costa not only from his more mannered opponents at Wembley but from your average home-reared Premier League player. This is a man who was not formally coached until he was 16, who learned to play on scrubland, who worked in his uncle’s shop into his late teens, and who was nicknamed “that fucking Brazilian” for his pranks, high spirits and all-round ragged behaviour as a young man at Albacete. Plenty of rough edges but there is no comfort zone here.
Albeit, there is plenty that is undesirable too. “Diego likes to cheat a lot,” Kurt Zouma said on TV after that defeat of Arsenal at Stamford Bridge last year, a statement Zouma later clarified through club channels by pointing out what he really meant to say was: “Diego is a player who puts pressure on his opponents.” You can say that again, Kurt.
Costa can be horrible, always seeking out the tender spot, play-acting, niggling and often crossing the line into gracelessness. At times this can distract his own team. At others it can be more controlled. It was Costa who led Chelsea to the 2-2 draw with Tottenham last summer that decided the title in a match marked out by Mark Clattenburg booking 12 players but not, incredibly, Costa, who had an unseen hand in at least five of those cards.
As Chelsea’s master of unease prepares for what could be a valedictory Wembley final his value is clear enough, a player whose presence would surely have improved every other team in the league over the past three years. Not least his favourite opponents, a patched-up Arsenal backline who will once again gird themselves for entry into the Diego Zone.
