In the 69th minute the Emirates rose to their feet to applaud as one. The score was 1-1 and their Carabao Cup quarter-final with Crystal Palace was in the balance, but Kieran Tierney was making way and they could not let him leave the pitch without ensuring the Scot knew exactly how they felt about him.
In some ways it was a belated show of appreciation for a forgotten cog in the Mikel Arteta project. A player who was left behind by the rapid progress and evolution of the team, but without whose contribution it might never have survived to see these brighter days.
Limping with cramp after his first match in six months, Tierney reached down to remove his shin pads and reciprocate the gesture, performing one complete revolution to soak up those precious few seconds.
Tierney was aware it might be his final bow as an Arsenal player after being informed by the club they have decided not to exercise the option to extend his contract, which expires in the summer. It is now possible that they allow him to leave for free in next month’s transfer window.
Against Palace the 27-year-old showed flashes of why he was once so integral to Arsenal. Early in the second half the ball was switched wide to him in space and he picked out an unmarked Raheem Sterling at the back post, only for the forward to squander a huge chance.
It has been some time since Arsenal fans saw that version of Tierney, the marauding full-back who bombed into space and injected a fierce urgency into Arsenal’s attacks.
His last appearance was in the Community Shield victory in August 2023, his last start in May of that year. Tierney has started just 15 games for Arsenal in all competitions since the beginning of the 2022-23 season — only two more than he has for Scotland in that same period — spending last year on loan at Real Sociedad.
After returning to the squad last month from a serious hamstring tear suffered at Euro 2024, Arteta had not given him any game time, even against Monaco in the Champions League when Gabriel Magalhaes, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Riccardo Calafiori, Ben White and Takehiro Tomiyasu were all missing through injury. Myles Lewis-Skelly started instead and even the right-footed Jurrien Timber was brought on in front of him despite being three goals up, which confirmed how Tierney has dropped down the pecking order.
Up until the end of the 2021-22 season, it would have been difficult to imagine the Scot being anything other than a key part of the team. A knee injury suffered in April 2021 coincided with Arsenal’s late top-four push collapsing and they lost five of their final 10 games in his absence.
Arsenal are now a team defined by their right flank but between 2020 and 2022 the opposite was true. Tierney was the catalyst for Arenal’s attacks with his lung-busting overlaps and bursts of acceleration dragging his team upfield, often by sheer will.
When Arteta’s team were floundering during lockdown and the belief in his vision was wavering, Tierney was the glue that held things together. He was the emblematic figure the support clung to as embodying what the manager was trying to create.
GO DEEPER
‘There is no spite from me – Mikel Arteta was 100% right’ – Kieran Tierney interview
In the first week of 2021, Arsenal had taken just 20 points from their opening 16 Premier League games and were 13th in the table, nine points off both the Champions League and the Championship. It was Arteta’s first full season but that winter there was a groundswell of fans calling for his head.
On a snowy night at The Hawthorns, Tierney produced an inspired solo goal to open the scoring for Arsenal en route to a 4-0 win against West Bromwich Albion. That unbeaten run bought Arteta breathing space and saw him platform Tierney, then 23, as a captain-in-waiting.
“I think he can be, because he has the respect and the admiration of every member of the staff and every player,” Arteta said in the post-match press conference.
“It’s just the way he is, he does it in a natural way. He’s a shy boy but I think he represents all of the values we want to install and that are in the DNA of this club.”
That goal at West Brom was Tierney at his most instinctive. It was the sort of devastating power that had convinced Arsenal to make him the most expensive Scottish player in history when they paid £25million ($32m) to sign him from Celtic.
Darnell Furlong was left for dead like a foal chasing a stallion as Tierney knocked the ball to one side and ran around the other from a standing start. Not satisfied with beating him once, he let the right-back catch up, zoomed past him in the other direction and drilled a shot with his weak foot into the far top corner.
Kieran Tierney scores a memorable goal against West Bromwich Albion (Simon Stacpoole/Offside via Getty Images)
It was a sign of how much trust Tierney felt from Arteta that he was emboldened to play so freely, and how much trust he had in his body to be so explosive. It is those two factors, however, identity and injuries, which combined to flatline his trajectory at Arsenal.
The arrival of Zinchenko from Manchester City in the summer of 2022 led to him being usurped by the Ukrainian. More profound than that, though, the left-back role was changed beyond recognition.
Tierney was a 0-100mph player. Zinchenko was intricate, a playmaker who had been redeployed as a defender. Arteta believed his team needed more of the latter if they were to become a technically dominant side.
Zinchenko’s form in the first half of that season helped transform Arsenal into title contenders but it reduced Tierney largely to a substitute role seeing out games. He came on 21 times in the Premier League and started only six matches.
On the rare occasions he did, Arteta chose to shoehorn him into the same inverted role he had carved out for Zinchenko but it was not a natural fit.
“I would put Kieran more in his strengths,” Arteta said in a press conference last week, admitting he had regrets about the way he had deployed Tierney.
“If we do what we have to do I would play him in positions, especially in attack, in situations and scenarios and spaces that he is more comfortable with. That’s a learning.”
It will depend on the fitness of Zinchenko, Calafiori and Tomiyasu whether Tierney does leave in January. If there if not adequate cover then a fully-fit Tierney can provide Arteta with a thrust and intensity that no other option gives him.
Tierney enjoyed his time on loan at Real Sociedad, even though it was blighted by injuries, and he is open to sampling life abroad again, but the return home to Celtic is something that has long been mooted.
“Being a footballer is the dream but playing for Celtic was the ultimate,” Tierney told The Athletic earlier this year.
“I left that to go and challenge myself in the Premier League and come up against the best to see how I’d cope. If I go back, I want to be feeling how I did there before. I’ll be a different player to what I was, as I’ve been away for years, but I wouldn’t want to go back if I wasn’t feeling 100 per cent in my body.
“I know the intensity and the demand to win so, if I go back, it will be when I’m still feeling good.”
It would be a seismic coup for Celtic to bring back a player of his calibre in his peak years, but when Tierney does leave it will be the closing of a chapter at Arsenal.
He is the only player who featured in the 2020 FA Cup final, Arsenal’s last trophy, to survive to this point. He is the only senior first-team player who predated Arteta’s arrival in December 2019, given Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli had only started 12 and nine games apiece, while William Saliba had yet to make his debut.
A day short of the five-year anniversary of the Arsenal manager’s arrival, Tierney’s impending exit reminds us of how fragile those early years were and how pivotal a role he played in getting both Arteta and Arsenal through it.
(Top photo: David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
