Happy Wednesday folks – still feeling pretty good about The Arsenal right now? I know I am. The goal difference, the defensive solidity, the form of players like Odegaard, Saka, Rice, Jorginho, etc, is all helping us to all start to feel a little more excited as we reach the real crunch point in the season.

I was listening to the Arsenal Vision pod as I went for my run this morning and there was something that Clive and Elliot spoke about when comparing this season to last season. Elliot started talking about how when you’re in a title race you don’t actually sit back and soak it all in, which really resonated with me, because that’s exactly what I’m like when it comes to The Arsenal. I am a worrier. I am constantly looking ahead, I’m constantly thinking abut the “yeah buts” and I feel like during season’s like this there is more emphasis of what is in front of you as opposed to what you have already experienced. I also saw a couple of Tweets of some of the Arsenal accounts I follow in the moment of that match on Monday saying “I’m just going to drink all of this in and live for the moment” and as I read a few of those on Monday I really did think “yeah, I need to get better at that”.

As football fans we are preconditioned to always look ahead; even this morning as I was listening to various pods discussing how we dismantled Sheffield United, my mind started to wander towards the game at the weekend, then Porto, then in a few week’s time at Man City. I even remember thinking to myself earlier that “it could all be for nothing if we don’t beat Brentford” and that is a familiar mentality when you are towards the top of the league. Elite sport – and particularly Premier League football – is relentless. The end point and goal is for trophies, those shiny silver trinkets, but what they represent is a sustained period of consistency and success in a competition. Losing in a cup final or on the last day of the season is hard, but if you don’t embrace situations like we are in now, then you spend your life waiting for something and when it comes to pass you don’t really enjoy it as much.

My brother is a West Ham fan. After they won the Europa Conference League the next day he messaged me and said “yeah, but that was yesterday. I didn’t think it would feel like this” and what he was referring to was the extreme high of seeing his team win a trophy, then the feeling that it was all over the next day and looking forward to the next season. I told him that was the wrong way to look at it; you have to take in to account the whole journey they had been on for the season in that competition. See it as the culmination of the efforts, not the only output. But the irony of me saying this, given that I write a daily blog in which I’m in a constant hamster wheel of fretting about an upcoming game, enjoying a win, then almost instantly looking ahead to the next game, isn’t lost on me. Let me assure you that.

Another classic example of this thinking is something I had the other day, where I tried to think back and remember the goals we scored against Newcastle. I managed to just about do that. Then I tried to think back to Burnley and I think I managed two of the five. Then I tried to remember West Ham and I recalled Saka’s goal from the penalty spot, but in that moment I couldn’t remember any more. And that made me think “how bad is that? The team are performing amazingly, they’ve given me such joy of late, yet I can’t recall what happened just a few short weeks ago”.

So whereas normally I am already going to start talking about Brentford on Saturday evening on a midweek blog like this one, I think today I’ll just reflect on some of the performances we have had of our players right now. They are in scintillating form. The manager probably feels like he has about 14 or 15 players who could legitimately make a case for being in the squad regularly. How can you drop Kiwior the way he is playing right now? How do you leave out Jorginho given how he is keeping this engine purring like a fine motor oil, lubricating all of the component parts and help us tick even more efficiently? What about Odegaard and Saka, who feel like they are hitting peak form at the absolute perfect time in the season. It’s brilliant. The range of passing and movement of this Arsenal side is a joy to watch and I for one am loving it. I’m loving the fast starts, I’m loving the way we seem to go for the thorat for teams early on in games, I’m loving that the angst I felt over the Christmas period feels like it is melting away day by day. It’s brilliant. I want more please, Arsenal.

And hopefully there can be some more memories made that are as positive as the ones we’ve had so far. No that I am resolute in trying my best to live more in the moment, I hope there are more moments in which I can just stop, observe, be impressed and happy that this Arsenal team is absolutely going in the right direction.

Catch you all tomorrow.