Good Form

Is the current Arsenal team our best for years? No, of course it isn't but I can't remember the last time our form was this good. This could have more to do with the in and out nature of my brain but we seem to be winning a lot recently. We're not playing as spectacularly as we have in the past but we're at our most cohesive as a unit possibly since 2007/8. Obviously I would take Fabregas back in a shot but when he was in midfield we didn't have the balance we do now. There is a calmness to our play that is completely at odds with the gung-ho, attack-at-all costs mentality we've seen in recent years, there is dare I say it a maturity to our play. Now this is probably because our players are a bit more mature. On Saturday our least experienced players were Szczesny and Ramsey. Both established internationals, one of them the captain of his country. Our team is finally coming of age.

You would think then that we'd be pretty confident going into tomorrow's game against Dortmund, the 4th seeds for our group, but despite the results on the pitch I still get a sense of tension from the Arsenal fans. We are of course conditioned to believe that Arsenal will do things the hard way, we always have, but it's a bit more than that. I think at the moment none of our fans want to put they're heads above the parapet and admit that right now we're actually a pretty damn good team. Which is fair enough because the first person to do that will be responsible for the inevitable jinx that such a statement would inevitably cause. And I think I may have just done it. Whoops.

But we really are good at the moment. Mertesacker's mistake aside our defence looks more solid than it has done for years, and we have a commanding keeper behind them. Our midfield is getting such a good understanding that I'm not even certain Wilshere will walk into the first team when he returns and up front Robin, Theo and Gervinho all look like creating chances even if only Robin looks like scoring them.

All this can change in an instant, of course, but you can't judge the team on what might happen but on what is happening now. Too often in the past we've got ahead of ourselves, imagined glory based on what ifs and now we're imagining tragedy on the same basis. But I've decided to live in the here and now and right here and right now, we're doing pretty damn well actually.

Best So Far

At the end of the season we will look back and as ever we will ask ourselves what was our best performance. Now hopefully our best game is yet to come but at the moment most people would probably plump for our victory against Chelsea. I, on the other hand, would say it was the game against West Brom. Yes Chelsea are a better class of opposition, and yes we put 5 goals past them at their ground but overall in the game against West Brom we were better.

We worked as a team, arguably for the first time this year. Yes Van Persie scored one and set up two but his performance was backed up by the other 10 men on the pitch. It was possibly the most comfortable we've looked this calendar year and we barely gave West Brom a sniff at goal. It was professional, and it's hard to remember the last time we looked like that.

We have a run of games that on paper look pretty easy now and that should send fear up the spines of all Arsenal fans, it has been a feature of Arsene Wenger's reign that these are the games we screw up. However the display against West Brom should have eased our fears, perhaps it's the fact that we have a few more older heads in the team now but in recent weeks we have shown far fewer signs of fragility and we're starting to go about the job with calm efficiency. Which is very much unlike us.

In other news Marco Van Basten, who I have always had a huge soft spot for, has said that Van Persie should stay at Arsenal for life. He made some very flattering points about Arsenal as a club and it's nice to see that the view of our club on the continent may not have been as damaged as it has in England by our recent form. Whether Robin will listen to Van Basten is doubtful, but I can't imagine his words would go unnoticed. At this point I was going to try and use a former England international giving advice to a current player as an analogy but I couldn't think of any player in recent times that has the same sort of status as Van Basten has in Holland, I then thought about using Geoff Hurst but quite frankly he get's on my tits and is living off his 1966 hat-trick if you ask me. So imagine if you will a former England striker who had similar qualities to Wayne Rooney but unlike Rooney had performed brilliantly for both club and country and had actually won stuff at an international level giving Wayne Rooney some advice in his career. Rooney would be a fool not to listen wouldn't he? Of course Wayne Rooney is a fool, let's hope Van Persie isn't.

Trend setting

The 0-0 against Marseille was down to many things. Fatigue after the Chelsea game, apparently; The lack of Van Persie up front and good defending by the French team. We could sit here all day and argue the relative merits of all those arguments but we won't because I don't want to.

What I want to do is to highlight a trend I've noticed over the last few years when Arsenal draw 0-0. Now I'm not going to back this up with empirical evidence so it could just be spurious nonsense but has anyone else noticed that while we don't have that many scoreless draws when we have one we tend to have a little run of them. In many ways they're like buses: they're ugly, they're annoying, they smell and if you haven't got your earphones in then you end up wanting to punch some noisy child in the back of the head. To be honest though I'm not sure a run of scoreless draws is what we need right now. Sure the clean sheets would be nice but we've got a little run of winnable games coming up and it would be quite nice if we could, y'know, win them.

In order for us to do that it seems that we need Van Persie to play every game because no other bugger can score when he's not there. This is problematic. Firstly because there's an international break coming up and we've got through two without Robin being murdered so there's no chance of him getting through this one and secondly because we need to be able to trust our whole squad and at the moment we can't. Our first team is looking pretty balanced at the moment and I think with Vermaelen back and Koscielny looking excellent we can start stiffeningup our defence. I like Song and Arteta in midfield despite what Graeme Souness was saying after the Marseille match "once you get past those two your right on to the back four". Yes, Graeme, but that applies to all midfields doesn't it? If you get past them you reach the defence, you moron. Ramsey is starting to look like he really can pull the strings and link midfield with attack and Walcott and Gervinho seem to be able to provide the chances for RVP but without our captain none of our attacking players seem to have any kind of understanding. Hopefully that will come with more games but at the moment we can't afford to give them the time to get that understanding. It's catch-22.

Speaking of Catch-22 there is a scene in that book where a man is lying in hospital covered head to toe in bandages with a drip in his arm providing sustenance and a cathater to store all the urine. Every now and then a nurse comes in and swaps the bags around. Maybe Arsenal should take this approach, surely people would work a lot harder on there recovery if they were being force fed their own filth every day. In fact perhaps we've already started doing it. I mean we currently have Tomas Rosicky, Robin Van Persie AND Thomas Vermaelen fit. Now if we can just cure Abou Diaby of his human waste product addiction we'd be laughing.