Somewhere above the penalty area, a small unmanned aircraft hovered over a grown man’s tears, and nobody has yet explained who authorised it. That is the honest starting point for Arsenal’s exit from the Carabao Cup, a night that somehow contained a red card, a penalty shootout and a piece of hardware that looked like it had been dispatched to file a complaint on behalf of the league.
Fleetwood Town play in League Two. They should be stretching in the tunnel, not chasing a sixteenth-round miracle. Yet here they are, in the last 16, beating a club with more trophies in its cabinet than most of Fleetwood’s supporters have had hot dinners. Every Fleetwood player who stepped up deserves a biography, and at least one of them deserves a documentary.
Arsenal, meanwhile, lost a man to a red card and then lost their nerve from the spot. The shootout was a slow dismantling, the sort you watch through your fingers while telling yourself it cannot possibly get worse. It got worse. The drone kept circling.
Then the question arrived: did Mikel Arteta go too far? It is the wrong question. The right one is how a drone reached the edge of the box before Arsenal’s defence did.