The Assassination of Arsenal Football Club by the Coward Helios


When Graham MacAree, SB Nation’s editor in chief, and I arrived at Meadow Park to watch Arsenal take on Chelsea in the women’s division, we stood by the barrier surrounding the field after entering from the right side of the main stand. He is a Chelsea fan, and I am an Arsenal fan. He bought the tickets for my birthday, and I was sure going in that Arsenal, the best team in the league, would win easily.
While I was comfortable with the prospect of watching the game from there — this is before we were told you could not stand by the barriers but had to be in the stands proper — Graham squinted while trying to look at the goal by the North Terrace and complained that from our vantage point the glare of the sun would make enjoying the game difficult. It was at this moment I should have known who the true enemy would be.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates criticized the poets for their depiction of the gods. For him, the gods were perfect beings in body and behavior. The gods of Homer and Hesiod resembled humans in that they lied, were vain, selfish and frivolous, and therefore not true gods. They were a corruption of the godly ideal. Socrates’ gods were the source of good but not evil, while the gods of the poets could be just as flawed and malicious as ordinary human beings.
In the same book, Socrates makes a distinction between the visible and invisible gods. The likes of Zeus, Hera, and Athena were invisible. They were the gods of the civilized world who cared about human life and might manifest themselves to people when they wished. Visible gods were gods whose presence was etched in the heavens forever — they are everlasting. These gods were celestial objects like the moon, the planets, and the sun, which Socrates calls the “child of goodness.”
If Socrates’ sun is akin to goodness, then it was replaced by an imposter when Chelsea’s women beat Arsenal, 4-1. A perfect being would not have interfered. It was rather the sun god of the poets, Helios in particular, the coward, who decided to tip the scales in a simple football game. For reasons unknown to us mortals, he made sure Arsenal suffered a heavy defeat on the day I visited.
The evidence is in Sam Kerr’s goal, Chelsea’s second. Kerr is known as one of the best players in the world but hadn’t scored since moving to Chelsea, and there was nothing about her play before the goal that was particularly threatening. At one point, she even miscontrolled the ball with her knees. Then a long cross from the left wing came into the six-yard box, a cross the goalkeeper should have easily collected. She didn’t, and it floated perfectly into the far post for Kerr to head in.
At first, it looked like the Arsenal keeper, Manuela Zinsberger, misjudged the flight of the ball. But Graham and I were standing right behind her goal throughout the first half. It was not a mistake of judgement. She was blinded by the sun.
When the ball was high in the air, Zinsberger couldn’t see it. She was looking in the sun as she tried to track it, which comes with the obvious painful consequences. It is why she stuttered about as the cross came in, knowing the ball must be somewhere close but being unable to see exactly where. And when it did appear, it’s too late. Kerr got her first goal not because of anything she did, but because of the spiteful god of the sun.
In myth, Helios is rarely portrayed as behaving badly. Maybe because the sun was naturally associated with goodness as the bringer of life, or maybe because Helios was eventually replaced by Apollo. In most of the stories in which he is involved, however, he resembles the exalted god of Socrates more than a god of the poets.
The most famous story of Helios involves his son Phaeton. Phaeton, in a bid to prove he is the son of a god, asks his father for a favor. Helios promises to do anything his son wants. The boy asks to drive the god’s chariot. Since a god cannot take back a promise, Helios reluctantly abides by the deal and tries to instruct the boy on how to properly drive the sun around the Earth. The horses, quickly realizing the son was not the father, run out of control and Zeus is forced to kill the Phaeton in order to prevent the destruction of the world. Accidentally setting up your son’s death is bad, but all Helios could really be blamed for was loving Phaeton too much.
The cruelest thing he did came after he disclosed the affair of Aphrodite and Ares to Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus. In an act of revenge, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, makes Helios fall in love with Leucothoe while he was courting another woman, Clytie. Clytie, becoming jealous, spreads the rumor of someone defiling Leucothoe, word of which reaches her father, who then buries his daughter alive.
Clytie believes the elimination of her competitor would win her Helios’ love again, but he hates her instead. He shuns her, refusing to allow the light of the sun to fall on her. She wastes away in sorrow, always turning her head toward the sun in hope of a glance. After her death, she is transformed into a heliotrope, which follows the sun throughout the day.
Though he is generally shown being better than the rest of the gods around him, Helios is still capable of cruelty. If he was a perfect being, the height of goodness, hatred would be an emotion beneath him. Even if we didn’t have the story of Clytie to look at, a fair assessment of Arsenal’s match against Chelsea would be ample evidence for his capacity for cruelty.
Two of the four goals Chelsea scored came from the left side, where the keeper couldn’t see because of the sun. They were the second and third goals, which put the game beyond the Gunners.
Just as with Kerr’s goal, Sophie Ingle’s incredible volley lost its shine (editor’s note: LOL) because of the simple fact Zinsberger had a hard time gauging where the ball was. In high-level sports, every millisecond counts in order for a player to be effective. That Zinsberger constantly had to hesitate before trying to make a save was fatal to Arsenal’s chances. Rather than turning away from Arsenal, leaving the team to shrivel up in the shadows, Helios turned his blinding glare to the team and its goalkeeper, allowing their weaker opponents (editor’s note: LOL), Chelsea, to put the game beyond doubt.
Helios’s final bout of hatred came when Chelsea scored their fourth goal. Arsenal had been dominating the ball and creating chances, and the goal came against the run of play to deny all hopes of a comeback. As Chelsea were celebrating, the sun went behind the south stand. I looked at Graham and laughed. If I had a bow and arrow at the time, I would have shot it toward the coward in charge of our solar system. Coincidentally, if there could be any coincidences in that game, Arsenal scored their only goal in the encroaching darkness of late afternoon.
As we walked out of the gates and away from the stadium, I wondered whether I had done something to incur Helios’ displeasure. Arsenal were top of the league going into the game, and no one would have imagined they would get beaten by Chelsea in that manner. The only change from all of their games and the one I watched was I was present. I had come to enjoy the exploits of Vivianne Miedema and Kim Little. Had I brought the wrath of the sun upon them?
But to blame oneself for the cruelties of a god is egotistical. It’s to assume I am the sun around which the worlds revolves around. It’s to also forget Helios is one of the gods of the poets. He is not a perfect being, and no matter how well he is written of, he still retains the capacity for maliciousness. He doesn’t need a reason, nor would those reasons be available to mortal men like myself. Maybe Chelsea had called on him for help. Maybe he was angry at being made insignificant by Apollo. All I can do is speculate.
As Graham and I went home and he boasted about his team’s victory, I thought of a scene from the video game God of War 3 in which Kratos, the protagonist, finds the wounded Helios in the city of Olympia after knocking the god from his chariot. Helios pleads for his life but eventually Kratos rips off the god’s head and begins to use it as an enhanced flashlight.
When I was young and first played the game, I thought the scene was too brutal and unfair to Helios. Now, after watching Arsenal improbable defeat to Chelsea, aided by coward Helios, which is the only sensible explanation for the defeat, I dream of being able to defeat the god in the same way. Then I could use his head to light the way forward for Arsenal’s eventual league title.

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