Welcome to Monday. I’m back at work. So are you. Life is shit and miserable.

Still, at least we can bask in the mini-glow of a decent run of three wins.

Chelsea fans? They are probably not feeling so good right now. Frank Lampard started the season badly and was called a fraud, then he had his team firing and he was lauded as the real deal, now he’s back on fraud watch because Chelsea lost again.

The hammer normally drops at Chelsea. Their owner has no time for sympathy or feelings of nostalgia. Though I will say, nearly every manager has had fans calling for their head this season. Ole G had United sniffing around Poch, now they’re apparently going to win the league. Jose was the king for a bit, then he dipped and Spurs fans were crying about their savagely bad football, now he’s somewhere in the middle. Carlo has had it. Nuno is getting it. It’s hard to make rash decisions when there are 10 points between 1st and 12th.

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Arsenal turned up the heat in the❄️snow❄️in a game we’d historically have trouble in. It was freezing, our form has been shaky, and we were up against a Sam Allardyce side. The perfect concoction for an afternoon of potent shit-housery.

Not January 2nd 2021.

Arsenal blasted out of the starting blocks and found themselves a sexy performance. Our 4-0 victory was more than worth it. We could have had 6 on another day. 21 attempts at their goal, 12 shots on target, dominant in possession, and plenty of variety to our attacking play.

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Arsenal seems to bounce from crisis to crisis with the fans.

William Saliba is the latest exhibit in the hall of ‘WTF ARE WE DOING?.’

The young Frenchman bossed a lot of games in Ligue 1. He made a cup final he wasn’t cleared to play in. He joined up with Arsenal 3 months ahead of time to acclimate… then he was binned from all the squads. Consigned to the U23s.

The French media are now whipping up a furor with a fanbase that doesn’t need much fuel to rage these days. They reckon Saliba’s people have been told Arsenal will look at loans AND sales this transfer window.

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Welcome to 2021 my darlings! I hope you had a lot of fun and didn’t sleep through it like I did. Fuck 2020.

Onto better things, I hope.

So, what have we to talk about today?

Saed Kolasinac has left the building. He’s taken a loan move to Schalke. He’ll still earn pretty decent money, but nowhere near what he’s picking up with us. Most importantly, he’s gauranteed game time, and a promotion to club captain. Really, he should have left in the summer and taken the move to Leverkusen, but here we are, now he’s in a relegation battle. The thing to note here… when you are in your mid-twenties, it’s hard to ignore that your job is football and if you want the full 10 years as a player, you have to actually earn minutes on the pitch.

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Well, here we are, the last blog post of 2020. A really, really, really shitty year for everyone.

From a football perspective, we’ve had it all.

We picked up a young coach who arrested the rot that had set in under Unai.

That new coach changed a lot of things. We looked better structured on and off the ball. The players fought like dogs. We binned the melts. Arsenal were far more competitive against big clubs. We won another FA Cup, beating City and Chelsea on the way.

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Arsenal capped off a very odd year with a win.

Do I care how it happened? No.

Am I happy? Yes.

Should you be? Yes.

If you thought the path back to midtable was going to be Chelsea performances week in, week out, you were mistaken. Arsenal’s pivot in football strategy landed with a warning label: It’ll be non-linear.

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Let’s start with a quote from Mikel.

‘It wasn’t like we had to play them {young players}, because we had enough senior players. We played them because they fully deserved it.’

The most beautiful words I’ve heard all season.

The most beautiful Arsenal.com words of 2020?

INJECT IT RIGHT INTO MY EYES I WON’T EVEN BLINK!

My major concern after the Chelsea game was that Mikel had been pushed into dropping the toxic exChelsea duo by an unlucky covid exposure. That we’d see them return as soon as they were available. Well, it appears they were dropped because they are toxic. There might be something in the stories about the two of them bitching to Edu. It might be the shitty behaviour behind the scenes. It might be Willian’s shit performances in nearly every game. It might be David Luiz trying to shame Mo Elneny on the pitch. Whatever it was, I’m fucking glad it happened.

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