Saka and Rice step up to earn nerve-shredding win

A scoreline that would have been predicted, but from a match that shredded nerves. Arsenal may not know if they will be Premier League champions, but they certainly know what it's like to be pushed to the edge in a run-in. Bournemouth more than did their bit in a 3-0 Arsenal win that, for a few hours at least, put them four points clear of Manchester City but with two more games played.

- MIGUEL DELANEY

The expectation that Pep Guardiola's team would go and win their remaining matches hung over everything, especially Bukayo Saka's 45th-minute penalty. If you wanted a scene to capture the deepest tension in a stadium, this was it. Saka rolled it in to bring relief but not yet total release. Andoni Iraola's Bournemouth made Arsenal do much more.

They might even argue that they didn't deserve to go behind like that, given how Kai Havertz went down. It was one of those typical "manufactured" penalties where an attacker clearly trails a leg to exploit a goalkeeper's needlessly outstretched foot. Arsenal would meanwhile point to an abrasive foul by Ryan Christie on Saka early on that drew blood but went unpunished.

Bournemouth were certainly drawing a sweat, putting everything into this. That is why there was such tension and such relief and maybe why Havertz took the opportunity to go down in the way he did.

Arsenal weren't yet desperate but they were getting increasingly frantic. It was a vintage run-in game in that sense, where the stakes brought even more out of a good opposition side. Bournemouth weren't going to be mere fodder: they gave Arsenal a much tougher challenge than Chelsea or Tottenham had.