English FA Premiership/Arsenal - 2 Bolton Wanderers - 2: When Arsenal do eventually lose another Premiership fixture it may well be in circumstances similar to those in which they dropped their first points of the season at home to Bolton Wanderers on Saturday.
Arsene Wenger's team had an off day and their opponents had both the nerve and the nous to exploit it. Having beaten Liverpool and come within seconds of defeating Manchester United, Bolton completed a trilogy of performances good enough to enhance their prospects of finishing even higher than the eighth place they occupied at the end of last season.
For Bolton, twice coming from behind to hold Arsenal at Highbury and interrupt the champions' initial winning sequence of six games, if one counts last Wednesday's Champions League victory over PSV Eindhoven, was the biggest of the three achievements.
Fulham might have looked more capable of beating Arsenal at Craven Cottage the previous weekend but they still lost 3-0. Though a Bolton victory was a relatively remote prospect they never looked a beaten side.
Arsenal's slip is starting to show. Again the onset of the Champions League has brought a degree of circumspection to football which previously rejoiced in its lack of inhibition. At home they are thinking thoughts of abroad.
Retaining the championship for the first time since 1935 may be a worthy goal but the Champions League is now Arsenal's grail.
The ghosts of past European failures had haunted their performance against PSV and on Saturday their football remained uncharacteristically tentative.
As Wenger observed afterwards: "We didn't find our usual technical level. From the start our passing was either too long or too short and when you start off like that it is difficult from then on."
Sam Allardyce, the Bolton manager, took a similar view. "Arsenal looked a little bit tired to me," he said, "and gave us more room than I expected. You can only have a go at Arsenal if Arsenal let you have a go, and they let us because they weren't as high-tempo as usual.
"When you catch Arsenal off form, which isn't very often, you have to take advantage."
Saying so is one thing, doing it quite another.
Bolton's first task was to contain Arsenal by withdrawing nine men behind the ball and putting multi-layered pressure on the man in possession.
This policy reduced Arsenal to one clear opportunity in the opening half-hour, when Thierry Henry, sent clear by Jose Antonio Reyes, was denied a goal only by the alertness of Jussi Jaaskelainen.
A solid block-tackle by Radhi Jaidi prevented Robert Pires picking up the rebound and this proved a significant portent since Bolton's burly buy from Tunisia turned out to be the best player on the day.
But when, after 31 minutes, Henry accepted a return pass from Patrick Vieira to outpace Bruno N'Gotty and pot the ball into the far corner of the Bolton net the plot had taken a familiar turn.
Before half-time Allardyce's side did little to suggest they were about to trade goals with Arsenal. Up front Kevin Davies was isolated,the influence of Jay Jay Okocha was peripheral and Bolton's movements in general lacked the width they needed if they were to get behind the defence.
Allardyce, however, is nothing if not an astute reader of opposition weaknesses. He was aware of the Arsenal goalkeeper Jens Lehmann's tendency to flap under pressure and knew that until Sol Campbell is fit their defence will remain vulnerable at free-kicks and corners. Throws-in, too, when they were hurled, mortar-like, into the goalmouth by Okocha.
Lehmann dropped one of the latter early on and when Okocha swung over a corner three minutes past the hour the German committed the cardinal goalkeeping sin of coming for the ball but not quite getting there, leaving Jaidi to bring the scores level with a mighty header.
No matter, or so Highbury thought. Within three minutes Fredrik Ljungberg had moved on to a long crossfield free-kick from Reyes to beat Ricardo Gardner with a superb first touch before sprinting clear to provide the low cross from which Pires, although slightly ahead of the ball, managed to flick Arsenal back in front with an instep.
This, however, merely inspired Bolton to carry the game to their opponents with even more vigour and with five minutes remaining Allardyce's earlier introduction of two fresh strikers, Les Ferdinand and Henrik Pedersen, did the trick. Ferdinand, getting above Kolo Toure, flicked on a free-kick from Okocha and Pedersen supplied the softest of touches to trickle the ball past Lehmann.
More decisive defending by Pascal Cygan might have denied Pedersen his chance. Wenger, though he mentioned no names, described his team's defending at set-pieces as "passive and naive".
The race between Campbell's return and the end of Arsenal's unbeaten league run, 46 and counting, may yet be a close-run thing.
