Hello and how are you? Sunday the 22nd of February sees the Mighty Cannon go east and up the Seven Sisters road for a clash with our favourite best friends, Tottenham Hotspur FC. KO at the Lane is at 4.30pm local time. Expected weather is partly cloudy, temps at 13° (feels like 12° ) and between 1 and 6% chance of rain.
I have nothing to add to this one, especially after the interesting posts on the blog this week, we all know what’s played out and what’s forming before us. Aspects of the media are setting us up for a fall, but I’m sure Arteta and Co have other ideas.
Missing for the Arsenal are: looks everyone’s potentially available, except long termer Merino.
Missing for the Spuds are: Wilson Odobert (ALC) Pedro Porro (thigh), Dejan Kulusevski (knee), James Maddison (ACL), Mohammed Kudus (thigh), Kevin Danso (ankle), Destiny Udogie (thigh), Lucas Bergvall (ankle), Ben Davies (ankle) and Rodrigo Bentancur (thigh), Cristian Romero (suspended). Doubtful is Richarlison and Solanke, but I think the latter will be back for this one.
The lads at Statto HQ were on their way to a large comic con and were attired in various styles of cosplay but still handed over the predictions: Tottenham Hotspur FC, Middlesex, 16.2 % chance of winning. Arsenal FC, North London, 60.9% chance of winning. Next up a holiday for the lads in Dubai and then Chelsea at ours. So COYG!
Mills
Our assault on the league seems to have gone from a Blitzkrieg to a Rorke’s Drift since Christmas. Kicking the proverbial out of Arteta and some of the new scapegoat players will do nothing to help our cause, but insisting the Sun is out when we are getting soaked to the bone, doesn’t seem too smart either. If anything good came from the fans and media murdering Wengerball on a budget, it’s that the horrible pain of defeat has, for me, been relegated to a dull ache. We used to play in a way that made me proud of Arsenal, win lose or draw. I know that often we were poor, but we always tried to me entertaining , brave and good. We had players that I adored, Arshavin, Cesc, Rosicky, Santi, Jack, Aaron etc. But those days are now just a beautiful memory and all the longing wont bring it, or anything approaching it back.
All we can do is support what we have, in whatever way we as individuals choose, and make the most of it. We might enjoy it less, but somehow we should at very least, try to get some joy from our hobby. If we can’t do that, perhaps it’s time of a new hobby, Knitting perhaps?
Games don’t get much bigger than this in my opinion, so enjoy what you can my friends. The run in will tell us as much about US, as it will about the team and our dear leader.
Pedantic George.
Positively Arsenal 
Nice summary George! COYG!
Ed, I remember Lee Francis but Russel Milton has gone from my memory totally. I can recall seeing Rix play left back at Highbury once. Not sure who it was against though.Grrr! Bloody memory!
COYG!
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Great preview lads,
Forgot the outside noise this is a game more than any other that you have to show your maximum support. We need the three points for the title push yes but we need the win for the confidence, momentum and the fact this is old enemy.
Historically the NLD is full of cards and full of goals and strangely the spuds have conceded a large number of own goals in this fixture as well.
Their new manager likes to be aggressive and on the front foot but also likes to keep it tight as well. He likes to turn the ball high up the pitch so we have to learn the lessons of the last couple of weeks and pass quickly, give the man on the ball plenty options so we don’t end up playing hoof ball and surrender lots of possession.
Their new manager hasn’t experienced the speed of the premier League or the hostility of a NLD and maybe this will be his undoing. The ref has given more reds than anyone else this season but doesn’t like giving pens so discipline will be needed for us today.
We know our lads will be be up for this and we also know when they are on their game they are very good so let’s go out and get three points today COYG.
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Sheffield Wednesday lost today to Sheffield Utd and with it have been relegated to League One, with 13 games left to play.
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Arsenal Women beat Bristol City Women 3-0 in the FA Cup to progress to the quarter finals
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Odegaard is with the squad today
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Raya, Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Hincapie, Zubimendi, Rice, Eze, Saka, Trossard, Gyokeres.
Subs: Arrizabalaga, Mosquera, Calafiori, Lewis-Skelly, Norgaard, Madueke, Martinelli, Odegaard, Jesus
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oh brother.
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wouls be nice to get a fourth…
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WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TOTTENHAM
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Nice. One mistake, but apart from that a fine performance. The warmth of the sun…COYG!
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FT: Spurs 1-4 Arsenal
Eze x2 and Gyokeres x2 with our goals, in a dominating performance, we played with far more purpose today, far less of the pointless circulating football. And boy oh boy what a hit that was by Gyokeres for our second goal.
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Hopefully Saka and Timber are not injured, both went off after knocks
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HAPPY St tottorings day everyone!!!
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History made today, only the fifth time St tottorings has taken place on a NLD day, only the third time it’s happened at the shithole and the earliest time ever and first time in February. What a day for all ARSENAL supporters.
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na ian we are not there yet, either another win for us or a draw for spurs and we are there, but not just yet, if we hadn’t blown the win v Wolves we would be there.
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10 games left, a maximum of 9 wins and a draw to win the title.
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THE EVE OF ST.TOTTERINGHAM by William Sphinctermillspeare
ST.TOTTERINGHAM’S confrontation with a ghostly apparition and containing the tragical historie of Dr.Faustus Chicken Spude, in 1 Act. Second folio.Non Inferiora Secutus. 1595 AD.
Dramatis personae:
Anon, a ghostly Chicken, all frothe and wine.
St.Totteringham, a saint of excellent style and infinite skill.
Actus Primus. A cold night un late February.
Enter the ghostly Chicken (moaning and frothing):
“Ooohhhh woe is me! Ooohh poor me! Trapped in anger ever thus and crushed by memories five and sixty years past, few save the longe-beards can recall such was the last, oh! my kingdom for a coop of wire and wood,of bird feed greene and goode! Yet my eye are but also greene with anger and jealousies!
Ooooohhh the winde mills of my mind! Usurped we can ever see by the Cannon! Our country lanes were infected, what art thou Fortuna?
Fickle!Fickle!Fickle! What foul perfum`d Wool-rich southern winds have blown these usurpers upon our country woods and by their folly erected theatres of beauty and others I can but only decry! Even a station was named after them thereby! Oh woe is me, woe woe!Hubble bubble boil and trouble! Ohhhhhhhh forced to wear the horns! Le corna capote! Ohhhhhh”.
Enter St.Totteringham:
Stay illusion!What? Art thou known to Mephistopheles?What kind of strappado is this, such taxation?Art thou free of self-bounty or purely here to venew unbarbed?Or art thou a grobian of the pullum familias that cometh from the yonder forgotten corner of woods,that they call the Middle Sex Coop?For thou art not of the citie surely? I often thought a Cooper was a man that maketh barrels for fermented wine, not some frothing beaste of torment and whine? For by my leave, there are many a strange fire-side tale from such uncouthe regions,for it is often said that out there in the chlorophyll`d country the swing-buckler folk there doth worship from the Newe Worlde that tis often called Americae, an unnatural base worke; the potatae. Or Spude as tìs known by those who knoweth such things and by which they too are called such and such. Art thou that which is named a Spude?
What strange musings are these musings upon? Art thou the haunted strange creature from the country chicken lagoon? Or washed upon these Positive shores from the darkest vapours of night and cursed to perform as a Chas and Dave midnight masque until dayes first light or finally purged of thy sins?
Of such waits I have heard, uttering songs that sound like a fowl turd!I have heard of such apparitions indeed, seen upon country lanes well within the deep dark velvet hours by travellers lost and in need! Tis strange indeed to behold such an apparition, and to consider things as country matters! Repent oh torn spirit! Repent! Begone! He that weareth the statute cap of the chicken shall reek ever more of the odours of the Coop, cursed with blots and stains and breedeth only a stench hence, all noise and uppity.
Good Sirrah, take my advice and change thy Lily livery to red and white, tis but only wise!
Repent! Repent! Thy memorie is steeled with bygone days, memories abased in an chemical black and white haze,and thence never to gold or silver find, thou art fogged and lost in the mercurial mists of time, when Helen of Troy had blesséd the earth with her beauteous gaze and set sail a thousand ships and cursed, the West Ham quite rightly to a lower worlde. Hath thou still tears for salad days long hence gone,back in the year ’61? I see that it rankles in thy mind,he that you call Judas, but knoweth he could but retire to win our purpose,and tis often colic for thee I can but imagine, it plagues thy mind, so lust doth play! Think therefore not on such matters and knowe that while with us he was but very a happie winner of cup and league and Invincibilitie!
Farewell, thou lob of spirits,I’ll be gone! Repent! Repent! I, St.Totteringham and these Positively goodly souls,doth beg thee repent!- before its too late for thy soul and thou art for ever cursed to worship the Chicken, ever hoping for glorie in thy amphitheatre and pondering like Achilles the plough-man, that hath lost his sweat and the green corn, to dreamily wonder up at the very vastly canopy the earth and search by thi`stars of heaven and question whence the named of foregone years was never to be incorporated whence, and yet tis thine own thought that maketh torture hence!
To temper these questions tis folly and a foolish ship to put to the winds of memorie, and tis but for the learn`d men that pour over fustian books forsaking the fires of winter to knowe, but foregone names shame us not, but tis more amusing and would take much more than verbal utterances to make such cut-works upon our guts!I have heard tis often winter in the land of chicken and affecteth the mind so beyond the help of any apothecary to be found here,there or anywhere.Tis true?
Yet we urge thee while pondering this too, think on, one Dr.Faustus! Yes he of Wittenberg, a fool! He too followed the Chicken!A cock-a doodle do! Hark his cries as yet in the lower coops of Dante’s Coop`d-hell!Hark! He too pondered the crowing cock,and twas tempted by the Coopers lust for power and footballe of the foul white-socke, and hath forever since suffered like a severed capon upon a fiery twiggen landscape of rocke, where hence candle and bell could no longer make haven!
Repent!Think on Faustus trapped in a Coop of his own making, forced by day to read at no sovereign leisure again and again, certain tomes by writers of their empty histories and siege, tales of yore and bore, forevermore, too study only engravings of failings in the Premier League!
Such folio’s that also conjure gladly,nylon-trouser flared, sideburn`d, tobacco, stacked shoe,and greasie fare,not even to mention ye olde budgie hair, are but trophy-wise,wafer thin?!Not even fourth,as a trophied look-in!
Look ye not at such foul-belched ways of beak and feathers! Cast thy eye not upon such workes, tis folly! Tis true, the master Doctor hath no idea what fowl thought were bak`d in the pie whence tempted by the strange ways of Haringey and lured by sweet lies of “shift and power” whispered in northern parts by many a nefarious towne crier.
“Curséd am I” Faustus cried to the night sky, “for I should have followed the Mighty Cannon, Gun and dear old Holloway!”His mind thence was poison’d evermore, swimming in a torment of poor sporting jealousies and rages and plagued by the lurid ways of the seven deadly sin-sisters,forced to watch abased games day after day except where the pungent fumes of gunpowder put paid! “Look at that! Look at that!”cried Les Mots,on. Repent I tell thee!
Repent! Sirrah,I implore thee! O curséd spirit release thy self from the mad-bred ways of the Lane, the Spude and the chicken beaste,and forget thy pain, learn from Dr Faustus,and an Arsenal fan become,the way of the Cannon and the Gun! See him again before thee, cursed to a cooped up hell of torture!Behold his cries for clemency, as he is thus forced to recall Mister Waddles hair, rank and all mulletie!
Tis enough for anyone cursed or not think ye not of Lily white and all that froth!
But come, lay down thy tattered and torn feathered shirt of white, and cast not thy beady greenéd-eye upon thy neighbours and singeth under the moon and stars with Saint Totteringham, for I am he!
But Hark! The dawn cometh ! The drums must sound and the shall cannons roar, as we call and score to stunt thy claim to the throne!
Begone oh fowl apparition! Gramercy for the dawn! Begone to thy coop and darken these skies no more! For merry making must we and thou must from this place fly! Begone!
But if I, and these here Positive Angels of Arsenal have offended,think but this and all is amended, that you have slumbered here while these words did appear,and I ask good folk do not reprehend, for if you pardon you will mend. And as I am honest Gun, if we have somehow unearnéd this here very sun, now to escape the chickens tongue, we will make amends long,else a liar the Gun you call, and goodnight unto chickens one and all!
Adieu!
Chicken: “Oooohhhhh, woe is me,oooohhh we were here first! Oohhhhhhhhhhhh woe is me curséd to thought of Perryman and former memorie!”
Exeunt.
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Gyokeres has now got 10 league goals in 26 games, and 15 goals in all competitions.
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seems Arsenal will this summer play Girona at the end of July and then play a game in Ireland at beginning of August.
Seems with the timing of the World Cup and the start of the new season we will not be doing any long haul this summer, so games will be close to home.
I hope the game in Ireland will be against Shamrock Rovers, they are the dominant team in the League of Ireland in recent years, and we have signed one of their players, Victor Ozhianvuna who will join next January. We also have had another few of their young players over on trial in recent months too. Also they are managed by a former Arsenal Academy player, Stephen Bradley
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In some ways the Spuds got away with a good result, for we could have scored many more. Big Viks second was a classic no9er, top save by Raya at the end, and the lads showed their support! Eze’s face today for both those goals, pure magic!
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Oh did I go too early, must have been the excitement
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https://x.com/i/status/2025652623609651527
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could look at this clip of Gyokeres first goal over and over, but not with that insufferable cunt neville talking shite, so sound off
https://x.com/i/status/2025628994125664544
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Arsenal Women’s star forward Olivia Smith was carried off today and brought to hospital after a clash of heads, its thought he suffered a concussion
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