Well good morning to you, fellow – very happy – Gooner! I’d pretty much downed tools on the ol’ blog front on account of getting up late every morning in a beautiful tropical island and just wanting to drink cocktails and sit by the pool, but having arrived yesterday just as the game was in its dying embers, I’m very happy to be getting back to my usual pattern of things and one of which is talking about Arsenal every single day. The fact Chelsea paraded their latest baffling signing who we all thought would be hours could have dampened the mood ahead of the game, but by the time I went to bed last night, nothing could have been further from the truth. The truth, as we all know now in the glorious light of a new day, is that this Arsenal team came across another obstacle and hurdled it like a prime Colin Jackson.

As I said I didn’t actually get to watch the game live. I flew back from holiday and whilst I thought I might be able to make the second half because of when we were landing, the delay we faced meant that the second we touched down on English soil I fired up the mobile and flicked on my Sky Sports App to see that we were 2-0 up and there were 86 minutes on the clock. I tell you something, so nervous was I ahead of this game that I was on the plane shaking as I waited for the phone to kick in and my 4G signal to start sending the football information to my phone. Frantically I asked the lads in a couple of WhatsApp groups about how we got on, to be told “great first half, second half less so and they came back in to it”.

Relief. Then elation, Joyous, joyous, elation. Victory at The Scum, something we hadn’t managed in nearly a decade and such was the home team dominance in the NLD, I basically started convincing myself on the flight home that it was ok to lose there as usual because we could try to bounce back next week against Man United and besides, City also lost so the five point lead remained in tact.

It didn’t just remain in tact, as we all know, but instead it grew to eight and proved once again that the confidence flowing through this Arsenal team is propelling them on forward every match.

I’ve re-watched most of the game and I’ll give it another go yesterday, but how comfortable we were in that second half, eh? I was actually stunned at how comfortable it was. We moved the ball with swagger; it was like all the times you have seen a Liverpool or a Man City go to big grounds in recent seasons and get results. Arsenal teams just haven’t done that. At all. Yet here we were getting in behind their press, forcing them to play their horrendous brand of deep-lying football designed to go one up and then sit off for the whole game. Designed to be low block and – let’s face it – boring to watch. So boring in  fact that I have seen some Arsenal fans suggest that the utter moron that kicked out at Ramsdale – who should absolutely be identified and given a lifetime ban and we should have it all confirmed by the Scum that they have done it – should face the harshest punishment of being forced to watch that Tottenham team again and again. Maybe A Clockwork Orange style with matchsticks propping his eyelids open so he can’t look away.

We however, will look everywhere we can right now, because that win not only proved to be a statement, but will also have convinced so many more people that perhaps we are actually in a title fight. I’m still – EVEN NOW – sticking with my mindset of “just get top four and the season is a success”. In the last 10 seasons the average points needed has been 71, with 79 being the highest. In my head I still want us to just get to that 75 point mark and we should be fine. But at some stage I’m going to have to revise that because if we can manage to somehow beat Man United on Sunday this week, we’ll be at 50 points at the halfway stage in the season. That would mean just eight wins from the final 19 games would be needed.

Perhaps that is a losing mentality given what we are seeing on the pitch though, because our opponents yesterday are a team fighting for top four right now. They are currently five points off it but I suspect they will still be in and around that place in the league and they came up against a side who very much looked like one that was in a title race. Alright, Saka had some fortune with his own goal he forced a pretty poor Lloris in to making, but we were creating these chances at will in the first half and when you also add the Nketiah forced save after the opening few minutes, as well as the Partey shot off the post that would have been a goal of the season contender, you could see that these two teams – right now – are world’s apart. We’re eating our dinner at Claridge’s, whereas the Scum are choking down barely edible scraps from a greasy OK Diner on the A1.

And that is delicious indeed.

It’s funny though, because when look at the stats after the game, it seemed a fairly even contest and perhaps that is because the Scum did show some fight in the second half. Indeed, the fact that Ramsdale was man of the match kind of shows that we needed to have all parts of our team functioning well to get the result yesterday. For all of the dominance of the first half we still had to dig in. But that’s what good teams do; they have a good goalkeeper who saves you as much of the time that you have a great defence to have games where he has nothing to do, as well as times in which you just need to outscore your opponents like we did at home to Liverpool earlier in the season, for example.

I’m already around a thousand words in and I still haven’t even talked about Odegaard. What a player. What a signing he is blossoming in to and what a player he is for us. With him in this type of form we are purring and even before he scored his goal there was a really good stop he forced Lloris in to. I love watching him play; he’s exactly ‘my kind of player’ as the saying goes.

There’s so many players I could wax lyrical about today though. Zinchenko, Eddie, Xhaka and Partey, Ben White, the two centre halves. All of them were just ace. The whole team were ace.

Arteta can be rightly proud of his team and I kind of like that Tottenham have showed themselves to be exactly what they are in this current format; a team who flatter to deceive, a fanbase who disgrace themselves, then muggy little players like Richarlison trying to go for some sly afters when the game had finished. Then, to see the players at the end celebrating with the away fans in the ground was great. After most games I watch on TV I usually just switch off and don’t both with the post match hub-bub, but I was totally drinking it in yesterday.

And I shall continue to do that for the next few days. I’ll re-watch the game, I’ll read all the match reviews, I’ll listen to pods and if I need to run any errands in my car, I’ll bother to switch on to see if they’re talking about The Arsenal. They should, because we are hot right now and I’m loving it.

Catch you all tomorrow.