Two minutes into the second half of this north London derby, Harry Kane took the ball inside the Arsenal penalty area and entered into a chest-bumping grapple with Gabriel. Kane stalled a little, struggling to keep his feet. Then he did something that seemed to capture the physics, the newtons of this match in a single collision. Kane pushed and found no resistance, no pressure in front of him.
Gabriel fell backwards, swished aside like a pair of rickety saloon bar doors. The ball was nudged back to Son Heung-min, who smashed it past Aaron Ramsdale to make the score 3-0. And this is what happened to Arsenal. They were simply overrun, pushed back by a superior force, made to shrink in the hard white lights.
