Howdy folks and welcome to Tuesday. I’m at a conference all day today so it means an earlier than usual start so I can rattle through a few work emails before I head off. 

It’s one of those annoying things where you know you’re out of the office and you know that unless you do this bit of housekeeping you’re just giving yourself more work to do the next day.

Anyway, why all this talk and not much of an Arsenal intro? Well, maybe it’s because I’m not sure what to say anymore. The predictability of Arsenal is even boring me having to write about it. 

Thankfully though we don’t have the players coming out on the official site saying ‘we have to learn from this’, probably because we know that particular ship has long since sailed, nobody believes they will learn from it so why bother even saying it. Hollow words.

What’s odd though is that now that we all seem to be accepting our fate as a team that is one down from the elite clubs in the Prem, I’m starting to look at the cup competitions as better opportunities for us to have a little bit more joy in, so when I saw that the Carabao Cup dates have been announced, I felt a little more excitement about seeing if the roasted players can bring out a win to get us in to the Semi Final. 

I might even go you know.

That’s because that competition and the Europa League represents somewhat of the unknown for us. We know that Arsenal can perform in these one off games – they did it at Wembley against City and Chelski only last season – but we also don’t know how the rotated players are going to play, who’s going to play, as well as whether we’ll get through to the next round. It’s the unpredictability of that which appeals a lot more than the Premier League right now. So I’m naturally finding myself leaning towards favouring those competitions this season.

Perhaps there’s also an element of actual belief that those competitions are at Arsenal’s level. Because we are nowhere near the competing clubs at the top of the Premier League at the moment. In fact when reading the media rhetoric over the last 24 hours it feels like everyone is finally accepting Arsenal as what they are these days: a one time challenger of titles, but now just a part of the next level down, and I say this because half of the pundits I read about just sounded a little sorry for Arsenal rather than the usual disappointment that they hadn’t performed yet again in a big game.

There just seemed to be a general acceptance that we just aren’t as good as City. We’re becoming a bit like Everton – not this season’s Everton of course – but kind of like how Everton used to be; a good team on their day, one that can pick up points against the big teams at home sometimes, a side that is recognised as probably being the ‘best of the rest’.

That’s Arsenal right now. The best of the lot below the best/elite. Which is probably why all the apathy from yours truly here.

The sooner we accept that for the next season and a half at least – and maybe longer if the absolute morons running our club don’t get the appointment right of the next man – the sooner it will be that our expectations are managed.

Right, I’m offski, so I’ll catch you in the morrow.