ARSE 2 MOUSE

Hands up who saw that coming? Liars. Yesterday must go down as one of Arsene’s most gloriously perverse results. With even some of his most loyal fans openly talking about the end days, the team go out and serve up the biggest goal haul ever recorded at the Emirates. For me, the best thing about our all-you-can-eat goal buffet was seeing everyone enjoying themselves again.

Not just the fans laughing and joking in the stands, but the players smiling on the pitch too. After Arteta blazed his volley over following more mesmeric approach play from Oxlade-Chamberlain, I saw Rosicky grinning in a ‘bloody hell that was almost a worldy’ way. (Which is definitely better than his ‘bloody hell I knew that free kick was going in’ grin.)

Wasn’t it nice being able to relax and enjoy a game too? I can’t remember the last time I didn’t want full-time to come when we’ve been leading. Even during the good run we were scratching out one-goal nerve-shredders. After the third one went in yesterday – probably my favourite because it put the game beyond Blackburn and because The Ox took it like he’s been playing at this level for years – I turned to my neighbour and said “I hope it’s a dicking.” To be fair I always say that whenever we go two goals ahead, and a full dicking rarely follows. Yesterday it did. A wonderful, unlubricated, 90-minute dickerama.

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Before kick-off I’d already decided not to write much about tonight’s game, whatever happened, because watching on Jolly Rodger-o-vision hardly gives you a good overview. But in the end it’s easy enough to sum up. First half: chances created, not taken. Second half: ran out of steam. A point was just about fair then. I’m not actually hugely cross either. I just think that kind of performance is about par for this squad. Sometimes they play better, and edge the other team out by the odd goal. At other times they don’t, and get beaten. Eight times in the league already this season.

And, as after the Utd game, I don’t have anything to offer in the way of constructive criticism.

Instead, why not customise the blog by picking some things to be angry and/or worried about from the list below and pasting them into the comments.

The areas of concern will all be fairly familiar by now…

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Hopefully even those of with you with Redknappian levels of literacy have had a chance to pick up (or download) a copy of So Paddy Got Up, the fuckin’ excellent Arsenal anthology curated by Arseblog. (Which also features a heartbreaking work of staggering genius by us.) If not, the lush hardback version has just been reprinted and is available here.

The tail end of last year also saw the release of another book aimed at Gooners’ stockings - Best XI Arsenal - which was co-authored by friend of the blog Damian Hall, and aimed to nail the greatest fantasy side in the club’s history. The digital version is currently available for £3.04 on Amazon, an FFP-friendly price which you’d hope even Arsene would be happy to pony up for.

He’d certainly approve of the lineup, which unsurprisingly leans hardest on his Invincibles-era side and Chapman’s dominant team of the ’30s,with Adams and Seaman as George Graham’s offerings. Each player in the team, which roughly lines up in a 442, gets his own chapter. Most of the writing is done by Hall and fellow  journalist Luke Nicoli, but Kevin Whitcher, editor of The Gooner, also contributes a chapter, as does Arseblog’s Andrew Mangan (who, to the surprise of precisely no-one, opts to eulogise duck-footed dreamboat Bobby Pires.)

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Had I told you a week ago that Arsenal would be signing a 19-year old attacking midfielder from Borussia Dortmund, you would have replied ‘wunderbar!’ We would then have begun embracing. Amazingly, that has happened (well, not the embrace… yet) but don’t get your Götze shirt printed just yet. Our new signing is actually Thomas Eisfeld (pictured left). And I could scarcely know less about him without starting to remove bits of my brain with a spoon.

The facts: he’s played once for the Dortmund senior team, scored six times in 12 appearances for their U19s, and already recovered from an apparently career-threatening cruciate knack. The fee is reportedly £600k, or just over two months of Diaby wages in old money. And who knows, maybe Eisfeld is Ron Weasley to Götze’s Harry Potter, and this is just paving the way for them to join up at Colney (Hogwarts) in the Summer. You can read more about our new boy here, but from all at Arse2Mouse – wilkommen to London!

“It meant that we had nothing to lose in the second-half, and I think everyone could see that we played freely and created some big chances.” That was the skipper’s take on the Utd game in yesterday’s matchday programme, but the same analysis is just as applicable to our second-half performance against Villa. During both matches we saw, after miserable first halves, the rewards of playing more directly, with a higher tempo, and basically just going for it.

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Sorry, I’ve got nothing. As none of you will have noticed, since this blog’s inception all the way back in the haze of August 2010, the only league match we’ve failed to post an article about was the 8-2 at Old Trafford. And that’s largely because I was at the bottom of a Portuguese swimming pool seeing if I could hold my breath forever. Yesterday wasn’t quite as bad, but after the defeats to Fulham and Swansea it has added some symmetry to our extended acid flashback to the start of the season. Co-blogger Dave had the ticket yesterday, and his blood is still too fired up to write anything coherent. And by which I mean anything that wouldn’t contravene the obscenities act.

At this point I don’t have anything constructive to say either. Nothing to add to the furious debate that’s polarised and split our fanbase, leaving those at either end of the spectrum equally stubborn when it comes to considering each other’s points of view. Nothing to add on the Oxlade-Chamberlain substitution other than we’ll likely never know the truth of it. Nothing to add in terms of squad anal