Happy Saturday Gooners. It’s FA Cup weekend but as seems to be par for the course these days, we don’t play until Sunday. I suppose we’d better get used to it because next season unless something drastic happens in the Premier League, we’ll be seeing a lot less Saturday football and a lot more Sunday games, so complaining about the situation at the moment might be like the proverbial p*ssing in the wind.

Of course today’s FA Cup game is the mother of all evil games. Two horrific football teams going head-to-head for a spot in the final and even if we do somehow manage to overcome Man City tomorrow afternoon, the players will have the unenviable task of having to try to overcome one of the two best teams in the country.

There are some who have said that the dream would be to smash Spurs in the final to give them misery and heartbreak, but given the two north London sides’ respective form, it is us who would be more worried of that if both teams win this weekend.

But I don’t want to be going in to the final weekend of football in the season knowing that Spurs are Champions (surely not?) or that they could snatch a cup from us. I would rather see Chelski winning all day long and that says a lot about where we’re at right now because I detest Chelski as much as that lot from up the road. The thing is though, as much as I despise Chelski, the fact that they’ve won things in recent years makes them going on to win the league a lot less stomach churning. Can you imagine if Tottenham won the league or cup? They would be beyond unbearable. We’d get more idiots pushing out “better than the invincibles” tripe on a weekly basis. They’d have a season of gloating. They already gloat having won absolutely sod all for a decade, so imagine if they force their way towards actually winning something?

So with that in mind, there is no result whatsoever that can come from today that is even remotely acceptable, but the one which leaves me with the least nerves right now is for the Chavs to get through to the final.

The rest of the news that appears to be on the official site surrounds historical days at Wembley, with cup wins and other memorable performances, which you’d expect on this weekend to be honest with you. After all, when i make my way to Wembley to find the nearby pub i’ll be meeting people in, it’ll be a pre-game selection of memories from years gone by that will be the top of conversation that will be top of the bill, so the club are merely stoking the fires of glory to help us all get excited of what may come.

Of course the current form as it is might not enable us to feel as comfortable as we’d hope to in a game like this and I suspect there might be a few glum faces when we get around to talking about the latest selection of Arsenal players to make it to Wembley, but at least for the few hours before the game we’ll be able to savour the hope and remember glorious days of old. That’s something and if I’m honest with you, that’s what I’m looking forward to more than the game itself. In fact, every time I even start to think about the game I get a knot in my stomach and it starts to churn a little bit more, so I’m hardly a bag of confidence ahead of what could very well turn out to be a season defining game.

Still, let’s look on the bright side, which is that at least we get days out like this. Last night I had a beer with a couple of workmates and one was a Millwall fan. He said that Millwall had been to Wembley three times in his life and he was fortunate enough to see two of those games. And he was telling me that fans in the same league as Millwall were envious of him! So when I tell him that I’ve been to Wembley five times, going on six in the last six years, I feel a little spoiled.

So that’s how I’m going to approach it tomorrow – as a day out and an outside chance of victory. Hopefully that tempers my nerves a bit, but perhaps i’m just trying to convince myself a little too much!

Anyway, until tomorrow, when the real nerves kick in!

Laters.