There was a time not so long ago when Arsenal might have reacted differently to taking a sucker punch in the second minute.

That it was Morgan Rogers who fired the opener for Chelsea was extra annoying because, as everyone in the Emirates knew, he should have been playing for Arsenal.

At the beginning of the summer it looked as though Rogers would be Mikel Arteta’s main summer recruit. But Arsenal dawdled, pursuing deals for Vinícius Júnior and Julián Alvarez which didn’t work out and ultimately allowing Chelsea to sneak in and take Rogers from under their noses.

It’s not that Rogers is a lethal forward on the level of Vini Jr or Alvarez – not yet, maybe never. But he is such a typical Arteta player – a 6ft 2in powerhouse who can score and create. Arteta would have envied how Chelsea could use Rogers as an out-ball for Emiliano Martínez’s long clearances.

Rogers is also at a stage of his career where he’s still happy to do what his coach tells him. Vini Jr, an already-established superstar whose rebellion against Xabi Alonso’s tactics did so much to get the coach fired at Real Madrid, would have been more challenging to work with.

Arsenal’s failure to add any attackers beyond Christos Tzolis had caused angst among their supporters, and for Rogers to rub their noses in it right at the beginning of the game was a classic cortisol-spiker.

The last time Arsenal played Chelsea at the Emirates, Jurriën Timber scored a second-half winner then talked about how the team had struggled to cope with “the energy in this place, the anxiety” – a common theme when Arsenal have struggled at home in recent seasons.

This time they came immediately back at Chelsea, stuffed them straight into the washing machine and turned it up to max. Not only did they not shrink from the challenge Chelsea had thrown down – it was clear that they were enjoying it.

The next 20 minutes saw Arsenal hit the target six times and score a goal through Riccardo Calafiori that was ruled out for offside. Chelsea were already punch drunk by the time Kai Havertz scored the equaliser with a shot from the edge of the box.

The goal suggested Martínez might have arrived at Chelsea a couple of seasons too late. Chelsea’s army of sporting directors finally lost patience with Robert Sánchez after his poor performance in the opening game at Fulham, catching up with the Chelsea crowd who had lost faith in him long ago. Martinez is respected as a “big personality”, but here was evidence that his reflexes no longer quite match up to his alpha-dog stylings.

In Martínez’s defence, maybe he was still feeling the effects of getting kicked in the head by Gabriel during one of the goalmouth scrambles a little earlier. That the officials took such a lenient view of Gabriel’s action, which could easily have been a straight red card, was the only fortunate element of Arsenal’s win.

At half-time Xabi Alonso would have contemplated his options and realised he had hardly any good ones. His midfield was being overwhelmed but it was not easy to see a way to change that.

Chelsea’s starting pair in midfield, Roméo Lavia and Reece James, are both good players, but Lavia is always going to tire while James is a perpetual injury risk. In the absence of the injured Moisés Caicedo, the full cost of the deadline-day deal that took Enzo Fernández to Manchester City was sinking in.

Plainly that was not a deal Alonso would have sanctioned, if it had been up to him. The club has spent more than €2 billion on new players in the last four years, and somehow the coach’s options in central midfield had already dwindled to the leprechaun-sized Argentinian Valentín Barco, and the right wing-back Malo Gusto.

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Alonso decided against feeding Barco to Declan Rice. Gusto it was who eventually replaced Lavia and he proceeded to give a performance that will surely be his last in central midfield for Alonso.

By that time Arsenal were already leading 2-1, after Havertz’s clever dummy played Martin Ødegaard through to hammer it high past the exposed Martínez.

Arsenal’s central midfield bench options included two Spanish World Cup winners and the £75 million signing Bruno Guimarães. A key advantage Arsenal have over Chelsea: their squad has been designed as a football team rather than a trading portfolio.

In fact, the only uncomfortable part of the game for Arsenal came very late, after Arteta had taken off Ødegaard and Havertz, probably their two best players on the day. Taking the opportunity to rest key players in a game against one of Arsenal’s very few potential Premier League challengers was a risky move, but also a confident one.

Sometimes winning a first major title transforms the mentality of a team. You think of Liverpool’s 2019 Champions League win being the springboard to winning 26 of the first 27 games on the way to the 2020 title. Or how Manchester United’s first title win under Alex Ferguson in 1993 forged an indomitable confidence that carried the team through the next decade. They had lost the 1992 title to Leeds after seizing up on the run-in amid national ridicule (Arsenal have experienced similar once or twice in recent years) but, after the first title, winning became normal.

It feels as though Arsenal are in just such a moment. Fully convinced they are the best, and determined to show it.