Eight factors to separate the true choke from a mere collapse

When not pointing and laughing at Frank Lampard or whatever it is Spurs are currently doing to themselves, English football is currently consumed by one subject: are Arsenal bottling it or not?

Brilliantly, the conversation has already moved on entirely from whether or not the team still holding a four-point lead at the top of the table might actually be able to win the league or not. It is now widely if absurdly presumptuously assumed they will not. The discussion is entirely about whether or not the now inevitable failure constitutes a bottling or not.

We’re not here to answer that essentially unanswerable question, but it does intrigue us. What even is a bottle job? We submit that it’s one of those things that’s hard to define but one knows it when one sees it. We’d also submit that it’s more art than science. And also that your previous opinions and biases on the club involved are disproportionately important.

But we’ve tried to provide a guide. Here, then, are eight factors that make up The Bottle Job…

Size of lead
Obvious starting point is obvious, but you’d be surprised. Yes, at the most basic level the bigger the lead you hold the worse a bottle job looks. Unofficially, anything in double figures is going to be pretty hard to explain away as anything else, but relatively small leads can be deemed bottle jobs in the right conditions. Or even no leads at all. Spurs quite literally never topped the table in 2015/16 or 2016/17, which is in its own mischievous way the Spursiest bottle job of all. They even bottled going top of the table, most specifically in 2016 when they would have overtaken Leicester with a win at West Ham in a game they would lose 1-0. West Ham, by the way, are suspiciously good at inserting themselves into these situations in general. Worth investigating.

Games remaining
A corollary of lead size. The fewer games remaining, the smaller a lead needs for its loss to be a chokey bottle job. Liverpool’s 2013/14 performance – in many ways the archetypal bottling – encapsulates this one nicely. Going into the Chelsea game they only actually led City by six points having played a game more. But that brings events to a head, to a sharpened focus.

The flipside of this is that if you can do your bottling early enough you can often get away with it. Chelsea themselves are fine examples of the genre. Sure, Gerrard’s slip and Demba Ba etc and forth, but Chelsea should have been far more than chaos agent in that…