All things considered, I find myself surprisingly happy about the football at the end of this weekend, after The Scum did us a favour and beat Man City to ensure that our five point lead at the top of the league remains in tact.

And I was happy that they won yesterday. And I don’t care what anybody thinks about it. Why? Because it’s not about them. It’s all about us.

Yesterday I found myself very happy that Tottenham have won and it felt very dirty indeed. There cannot be a time in which it doesn’t as an Arsenal fan and from the moment you start supporting The Arsenal you learn to detest that lot with a passion. The worst game of the season for me is the North London Derby because it represents the possibility of defeat. It doesn’t matter who we’ve played over the years and how much has been riding on a game, the NLD is the one that has me the most nervous and worked up about. And the fact we don’t have to play them again this season because we’ve won in both games, is a massive relief.

No harm, no foul, this weekend. And that is a reason to be happy.

But yesterday, I wanted the Scum to win, because I was focused only on The Arsenal. An Arsenal defeat on Saturday meant that we needed the Tiny Totts to win because with every game that ticks down to the end of the season that we are clear daylight (points in the bag) between us and City, is one less round of matches for them to claw back points and overtake us. Tottenham are an inconsequence to me and my thinking right now. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t completely dismissed us collapsing and them catching us; after all they are in fifth. But we have an 11 point lead over them and two games in hand. Win those two games and it becomes a 17 point gap. So no, I didn’t mind cheering for the Scum because I don’t see them as a significant rival. They mean little to us for where we currently are.

City however, certainly are a significant rival for us this season and in two matches time we play them. In two matches time they rock up at The Emirates and if their form can be patchy by the fact they’ve come to North London and had a defeat handed to them – their fourth of the season – then I’m absolutely a-ok with it. They play Aston Villa at home on Sunday next week and by then we’ll have played Brentford. If we can overcome the Bees then it means we have an eight point lead going in to their game. That would feel like a big psychological blow and if Villa somehow picked up something at the Etihad, then it would be another blow ahead of a big crunch match under the lights on 15th February.

City themselves are – we are being told – ‘not themselves’. They are not firing on all cylinders and everyone is expecting them to suddenly ‘click into gear’ like they do for every second half of the season. But for every game that it doesn’t happen, every time they stutter, it gives me more hope. Which is why I couldn’t give a monkeys about the fact it was the Scum inflicting that defeat yesterday. The largest number of defeats by a Premier League championship winning side in the last seven years (going back to when Leicester won it FYI) was six defeats and that was City in 2020/21. The drew five and lost six, amassing 86 points. They are currently trending at an 81 point pace after 21 games – 2.14 points per game (45 points divided by 21 games). For them to get back up to a pace that would ensure they get closer to a 90 point mark that I suspect will be needed to win the league, they are going to have to play to an average of 2.7 points per game. So in other words, they probably need to win more than 13 of their next 17 matches to get close to that 90 point mark.

It’s certainly doable for them and they’ve done it before. I don’t buy all of these Pep excuses at the moment and yesterday he was moaning about having to travel all the way down to London. I too am waiting for the City behemoth to rumble in to gear and for them to start just swatting teams aside. But it hasn’t happened with the regularity that I was expecting and as far as I’m concerned any team that can keep them stuttering is fine by me. Whoever they are.

I also hope that the Arsenal players watching that match yesterday – which they surely will have been – will be taking the big positives from the fact that our lead at the top remains in tact. The mood amongst the players going in to training today might have been a little more sombre than we’d have liked, but thanks to that result yesterday they can all go in to training knowing that the weekend just gone has been completely neutralised, the defeat can be forgotten about, the players can focus on their next tough task ahead which is Brentford, for which they have a full week to prepare.

There is also time – and comfort – to assess that game on Saturday with a calm and rational head. The poor performance did not cost us. We had some poor performances but it made no real difference to the context of our season and as a result Arteta, his staff and the players can all sit down and objectively analyse the game, to ensure that we don’t make the same mistakes again.

It also felt like a few of those Arsenal players looked a little leggy – particularly Partey – so this now becomes an opportunity to properly assess that and there is also no travelling for the next game, so the players have plenty of time to be ready to fully extinguish the bad memories of this weekend by beating an in-form Brentford side who will certainly not make it comfortable on Saturday afternoon.

Right, I’m offski for now. Hope you and yours have a good one and I’ll catch thee all tomorrow.