That win against Leicester yesterday felt like one of the most dominant 1-0 victories you are ever likely to witness. If you just look at it from a scoreline perspective you’d probably think that it was a gritty, nervy, hard-fought and difficult win away from home, grinding out the three points and getting the hell out of Dodge. But the reality was that Arsenal were utterly dominant from start to finish and to use a well-worn boxing terminology: “never laid a glove” is how you’d describe how Leicester approached the game against Arsenal yesterday.

How much of that was Arsenal’s awesomeness versus Leicester’s meekness, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that what unfolded for the duration of yesterday’s 3pm kick off (why can’t we get one of those at home for a change, eh?) was – broadly speaking – relatively serene. I mean, it isn’t that when it is happening, because you are worried about the sucker-punch goal with Leicester’s only shot. I joked that Leicester would score with their first attempt on target. But if you completely limit your opponent to zero shots on target, then you really do mitigate the risk of that happening. Aaron Ramsdale was a spectator almost all day – apart from one shot wide from Dewsbury-Hall and, given that last season he had to make an absolutely worldie or a save from a free kick, it must have felt a lot more relaxing for our ‘keeper in the Midlands sunshine yesterday.

But let’s bring it back to the beginning of the game, in which Arteta did something that he’s been accused of not doing at times in his managerial career to date: squad rotation. All right, it was only Nketiah coming out for Trossard, but still it was a good move to sit Eddie down as he’s been looking a little leggy of late and Trossard has been looking good when playing. And I think the move worked as the Belgian looked lively, was connecting well with Odegaard and Martinelli and generally showed for the ball a lot, always providing an option. And we dominating the ball for pretty much the whole of the game. I thought Odegaard was connecting well, Saka had a few decent runs but was a little quieter and I thought Martinelli was connecting with the Belgian particularly well. That’s a good sign because we’ve been used to seeing them switch places for each other as competitors for the same spot, but seeing them link so well – including for the goal – was pleasing as it shows how interchangeable these guys are.

But before I talk about the goal, let’s have a word or two about the two major incidents of that first half that prevented us from going in at halftime one up. Firstly, there was the disallowed goal, in which Ben White was adjudged to have fouled Ward. I mean yes, Ben White is holding Ward’s glove, but I’m not really sure it did it to the extent that it impacted his punch with his other arm. There are players holding each other in that passage of play all over the box, so to have VAR step in and rule that out felt incredibly harsh to me. If you’re going to take a look at that, then you’d be looking at half a dozen instances like that every half. But of course VAR stepped in, ruled out what was a fabulous Trossard strike, so we had to reset and go again.

Then to have Saka bundled over in the box from Souttar like he was just a few minutes later, for the referee and VAR not to intervene or even take a look…that’s the really maddening thing. There was twice as much contact by Souttar on Saka as there was for White on Ward, yet Craig Pawson and the VAR said ‘nothing doing’. I’m sorry but if you’re going to apply the logic of ruling out the goal we scored to that instance, then you have to give that as a penalty. VAR once again failing to do it’s job.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Martinelli was booked for his first foul. Craig Pawson – in the bin you go my friend.

So we go in at halftime, probably feeling rather hard-done-by, but the response in the second half was good. Leicester did get better, but we got up and running almost as soon as kick off came in and Trossard’s nutmeg to find Martinelli for his goal was superb. Martinelli’s finish was equally good and we got the all-important goal that our first half efforts deserved.

Then it was a case of how we could control and contain Leicester, because the onslaught would surely come.

Except it didn’t. In truth Leicester barely troubled us for the whole of that second half and I have to say having seen some tough games at the King Power over the years, this felt like one of the poorest Leicester sides we’ve come up against. Even the arrival of Jamie Vardy to try to score his customary goal against us, never really got close to happening. It was kind of weird – but good – to see us so comfortable. But I guess that is part of my scarring of recent years; I’m still projecting The Arsenal of two or three years ago on to this team, when in reality these groups of players are far more organised, are far more in control and are able to see out games like this.

And that’s what we did. Gabriel, Saliba, White and Zinchenko rarely looked troubled and although we didn’t have Partey on from the start, Jorginho did a perfectly serviceable job in keeping us ticking over in possession. That signing along with Trossard is looking better and better with each passing week; it means we don’t have to rush Partey back from injury, he was able to get a 15 mnute cameo at the end and hopefully he’s fine to start on Wednesday night against Everton. The rotation options are there and now Arteta can bring Eddie in to start on Wednesday if he likes, or he can let Trossard keep his place and give Eddie a starting berth at home to Bournemouth next weekend.

If you’re going to call a game as the ‘perfect’ away day, that – a 5-0 romping aside – was probably it, because we were able to rotate players ahead of three games in just over a week, we were able to put another difficult away day behind us, we now have two home games in which we can establish our lead at the top even higher if we can manage to get a win.

There’s still a long way to go, we will have much more difficult games than yesterday, but this will be another confidence-booster and I for one am glad with the way it panned out.

Catch you lovely people tomorrow.