The need to make sense of football as though it is science rather than art has always resulted in an insatiable appetite to draw comparisons. As often as not, managers and players are shoehorned together so unconvincingly it's like trying to fit a rhinoceros with a stiletto.

Judging success and failure in any field invariably needs a benchmark to tilt the balance of opinion into either camp. The job of the football manager is so multifaceted, though, and no two clubs a pair, it is rare that drawing disparate figures together achieves anything other than raise the hackles of partisan parties either side of the fence.

Yet to compare Arsenal and Chelsea, and in turn Arsene Wenger and Antonio Conte, somehow seems fair game. The former has clocked up over two decades in the capital and the latter barely seven months, but this is not a story new to the Premier League.

Conte is likely to join Jose Mourinho (three times over two spells) and Carlo Ancelotti (once) in a line of Chelsea managers who have delivered Roman Abramovich league titles since Wenger's last one at Arsenal. It's the same film, just with a different lead.

As ever with Arsenal, it is more a question of mentality than quality. There's a cigarette paper between them and Chelsea in terms of quality and a cigarette factory between them in terms of fortitude. When an Arsenal player picks a mental challenge on the Crystal Maze, the automatic lock-in is triggered before the door has been closed.

Saturday's meeting between the two clubs could well provide a matching bookend to line up with the corresponding fixture in September. It is to oversimplify Conte's work to say it was the match that has made Chelsea's season, but it is certainly the one that has singularly shaped it the most.

If the result of Saturday's game more or less draws a curtain on an Arsenal title challenge for another season, in February, Wenger—or more likely the club and him together—could decide in the summer to politely end a marriage in which both parties still love one another but alas are perhaps no longer in love with one another. It's one of the most commonly cited grounds for divorce. Spending £30 million on Granit Xhaka would probably qualify as unreasonable behaviour, too.

It was all so different in September. Having watched his side systematically dismantle Chelsea 3-0 at the Emirates courtesy of a rarified performance where Arsenal were as tenacious as they were technically perfect, Wenger floated into his post-match press conference as though a teenager in the throes of first love. It's impossible not to admire, if not even be a little envious, of a 67-year-old still capable of being in wonder to a vision purely of his own design.

"There were times in the first half it was nearly perfect. We played with style, pace and movement, and that's the style we want to play," Wenger purred, per Tom Hopkinson of the Mirror. 

"It's one of those moments in your life as a manager when you think, 'Today it is a great day'—especially in the first half. ... I'd say that was one of our best performances in recent years. The inconvenient facts were to get those recent defeats out of our system and we did that."

Wenger's time as Arsenal manager has encompassed three Premier League titles and a record six FA Cups. For him to discuss a performance that marked his 20-year anniversary in north London as being "nearly perfect" and "one of those moments" says much about the significance he placed on a first league victory over Chelsea in five years.

When taking into account his disinclination to deal in hyperbole, it becomes self-evident he saw it as a genuine turning point. It was. Just not for Arsenal.

The "inconvenient facts" are Chelsea have since made up a 12-point swing on Arsenal and for the season are 28 points up on last term's annus horribilis.

For Chelsea and Conte, it was less a gentle wake-up call than being woken up via a bucket of freezing cold water. On the day, Chelsea looked old, anemic, disinterested, disjointed, slow and slovenly. A little like Arsenal on Tuesday against Watford.

In September, the result meant Chelsea dropped to eighth. They were eight points off then-leaders Manchester City. Conte was seething. On the evidence before him, the previous campaign that cost Mourinho his job was not the freakish aberration many painted it to be.

Having conceded nine goals in four matches, the Italian's eyes told as many stories as his words did in the post-match interviews. He looked through his interrogators as though already seeing the future. It was unquestionably the moment Conte decided he would strip Chelsea back and redesign them in his own image. It has worked. Some of his players are even clocking up more miles than he does over the course of 90 minutes.

Midway through the second half at Arsenal, he had switched Chelsea from a 4-2-3-1 formation to a 3-4-3. Though it's a system he has favoured throughout much of his managerial career, Conte did not give the impression a quick-fix solution had been found.

"The situation is that, every game, we concede minimum three goals. Two at the back, three at the back, four at the back, I don't care," he said, via Jack de Menezes of The Independent. "I just have to solve this. I must find the right solution for this team because, in every game, we are conceding two goals minimum. I work a lot to find the right solution."

His rhetoric was stoic and infectious. He found a solution before he had left north London.

Chelsea won their next 13 Premier League matches, as Conte, without missing a beat, brought back into vogue playing three at the back, reinvented Victor Moses as a wing-back, converted Cesar Azpilicueta into a centre-half, somehow made N'Golo Kante an even better player, restored the confidence of Nemanja Matic, made a real defender of David Luiz that didn't require a joystick to operate, rebooted Pedro, got Diego Costa scoring/smiling/sulking ad infinitum again, freed Eden Hazard and imprisoned Branislav Ivanovic, John Terry, Cesc Fabregas and Michy Batshuayi.

Ivanovic, who was stand-in captain on that fateful day against Arsenal in the absence of the injured Terry, admitted Chelsea's players had let the manager down. He never started a league match for the Blues under Conte again and was sold to Zenit St Petersburg on January's transfer deadline day.

Dispensing with Ivanovic was hardly a knee-jerk reaction given his form had been wretched for over 12 months. What it demonstrated, though, was Conte acts quickly and decisively, without sentimentality softening the corners of his decisions.

In 377 appearances, the Serb won every major domestic and European trophy while at Chelsea, including scoring the winner in the 2013 Europa League final against Benfica. 

Thanks for the memories, but Conte has a football club to run. He thinks in black and white, as opposed to putting his thoughts through a sepia-tinged nostalgia filter.

Similarly Mikel John Obi has finally left the building. The world's richest professional five-a-side player would probably still have been at Chelsea in his 50s prior to Conte having a quiet word to inform him it's time to move on. Most importantly, Terry remains onside from the sidelines. That's quite the piece of man-management on Conte's part.

Football is invariably described as a hard industry, yet how often is a long-serving player allowed to outstay his usefulness at a big club? 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, its author Milan Kundera writes, "The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other."

There's an argument Wenger has been a hostage to sentimentality for so long he has become incapable of cutting ties when his players' contracts are up. His detractors would argue the same could be said of the Frenchman and Arsenal's board. The accusation the dressing room at Arsenal is too cozy and familiar is not a new one. If titles were given for Instagram productivity and proficiency, Arsenal would have had it wrapped up by now.

The midweek Premier League fare was a perfect case in point. While Chelsea were grinding out a 1-1 draw at Liverpool, Arsenal were losing at home to Watford. Sat in the stands due to a touchline ban, Wenger wore the look of a father made to watch CCTV footage of an unsupervised teenage child on an ill-behaved night out. Equal parts enraged and embarrassed, it was a fitting reaction to an Arsenal performance as bad as they were brilliant against Chelsea in September. Assistant manager Steve Bould looked on as helpless as a substitute teacher in a failing school. 

It should have been the night Arsenal made two points on Chelsea, with Tottenham Hotspur dropping points at Sunderland a further unexpected fillip. The only point Arsenal made is they are no more ready to win the title than at any other juncture since the last one in 2003-04.

"We were not mentally prepared, not mentally ready to deal with the duels," Wenger told the press, per The Independent's Jack Pitt-Brooke. "You don't make 47 points from 23 games if you have no physical power, but you have to switch it on at 100 percent every time in Premier League. That is what it's about."

It was an admission frank to the point of being limp by Wenger. To concede in a title race his players were not mentally ready for the challenge of facing a Watford side that had previously won just two matches away from home all season and were on a run of one win in nine (against Burton Albion in the FA Cup) is surely to invite questions of his own culpability.

Social media on Tuesday evening was quick to highlight Arsenal's warm-up was so laid back, it was the first in Premier League history to involve deckchairs and pina coladas. It's hard to imagine Wenger hiding himself in a laundry basket in order to administer his side with the proverbial rocket, but had he done so, it may have prevented a first half in which Arsenal failed to have a single shot on target and were fortunate to only be two down.

According to The Times' Matt Hughes, a beleaguered Wenger gave his players two days off to leave them with just one session on the training ground prior to Saturday's game. It may be the right thing to do—Wenger knows his players better than any of us—but in terms of exposing himself, it's the equivalent of wearing a target on his back while visiting a rifle range.

On the contrary, Conte continues to work his players to the point of exhaustion. Think J. K. Simmons' tyrannical music instructor in Whiplash, only with more hair.

It was just such an Arsenal result. Victory against Watford would have reduced the deficit with Chelsea to six points and meant they could have gone into Saturday's lunchtime kick-off relatively buoyant on the back of five wins from six Premier League matches since losing back-to-back games against Everton and Manchester City in mid-December. Now they travel west replete with a nine-point gap and confidence at a season low.

There's nothing inherently bad about Arsenal; it's just so achingly obvious they will not win the league under Wenger. That's this season or any other. That's not to say they would fare better under a different regime—Manchester United are testimony to the fact replacing a manager deservedly cast in bronze is fraught with difficulties—it's just when the same tale has been playing on a loop in north London for 13 years, it's not hard to recall how it ends.

In the four months since they last played each other, Conte has got Chelsea into pole position to win the title. It does tend to raise the question why everyone else finds it so difficult. Maybe Wenger is just too close to it.

Whether Arsenal win, lose or draw on Saturday, it will invariably be the topic of the Frenchman that rages the longest through the night and into Sunday.

The great American writer John Updike once said, "A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one-and-a-half times his own weight in other people's patience."

After more than a decade of the exact same debate with regards Wenger being duked out on pretty much a weekly basis, it's a wonder some Arsenal supporters don't require two seats.

For context, Conte has so far this season no more made a mug of Wenger than he has Mourinho, Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino and Jurgen Klopp. The top six are all infinitely better than they were last term; it is just Chelsea are that much better again.

They have won 15 of their last 17 Premier League matches and conceded just seven goals over that period. It's the most remarkable of records for a Chelsea side that has already chalked up six more points than in the entirety of last season, with 15 matches still to play. Losing so comprehensively to Arsenal was the catalyst for Chelsea's title march, but Conte does not sound as though he thinks he owes them a debt of gratitude.

On the contrary, it would more appear he is drilling into his players the notion of Saturday being a revenge mission to rectify the only really embarrassing blot on the cleanest of copybooks.

"For sure we face another great team because Arsenal can fight for the title," Conte said, per Miguel Delaney of The Independent. 

"Don't forget that in the previous game we lost 3-0 away, and I think this could be a good chance for us to show that now in the second part of the season we are a totally different team if you compare the previous game. It's a good chance for us."

A totally different team seems like a perfect epitaph for Chelsea under Antonio Conte.