Well now, that was much better than the Ipswich game, eh?

In fairness, there is of course a lot to do with game state with all matches and the one on 27th at home was against a team absolutely battered in their previous match and therefore naturally not wanting to create a spiral of doom by leaving themselves open against us, so I don’t think I ever expected it to unfurl as that match for Ipswich with us against Brentford yesterday.

Brentford are a good team and at home, they’re one of the best in the league, so make no mistake this was an impressive performance by The Arsenal yesterday evening.

I’m still in South Africa for the next couple of weeks and as such posting has been difficult due to lack of signal, but as opposed to last year with the festive period feeling like we were in trouble, this year so far we have come out of it relatively unscathed. Of course we play Brighton in two days’ time and that will represent another really tough away day, but from what I saw yesterday, I’m feeling pretty chipper about our chances right now.

Arteta named a bit of a shuffled starting XI and in came Nwaneri for his first ever start in the Premier League. No Kai Havertz due to illness could be a suggestion that it’s the reason he started the 17-year-old, but I wonder if actually, in fact, the absence of Saka has forced his hand more. Finding a replacement,ent for Bukayo is impossible, going in to the market will be difficult, but if you can roll the dice on a teenager who has already been looking good this season, then it’s certainly worth taking the punt.

He did, it worked, because I thought Ethan looked a threat all night. He cut in when needed, he linked with Ødegaard well and despite the fact the first goal from Brentford put us on the back foot (with their first bloody shot n’all), I thought we were the brighter side from the first minute and Nwaneri was a big part of that.

It wasn’t just that as a change though. Rice also didn’t start and I’m not sure if that was because he’s still carrying something or based on the form of Thomas Partey, who I thought was also excellent yesterday. He dictated the movement of the ball, continuously rotated it, moved us around quickly enough and if it wasn’t for a shaky start from Rays with their first bloody goal we conceded, we might have got the goal and never looked back.

Of course in the moment you don’t feel like that and off the back of the Ipswich game, I certainly had worries that we would struggle to break down a Brentford side who are clever in how the set about their game plan. They were happy to give Arsenal the ball in certain positions, they let us have it, then went long a lot and then they also – at certain points they were very precise when delivering quick moves through the middle. I also thought they had a game plan that was focused on using physicality and within the first ten minutes they’d ’left one in’ on a few Arsenal players.

The early goal they scored had many of us worried, but the Arsenal players kept at it and thankfully we got our reward before halftime, even if Raya nearly made us pay a heftier toll. His poor handling was salvaged by his own reflexes to keep the ball out of his own net and within a minute we were up the other end of the field and level.

Gabriel Jesus has bagged another one and as I’ve already mentioned before (and will absolutely labour the point again) he’s the sort of player with which you get this. It’s needed because without Saka we need to spread the goals around and thankfully yesterday we did.

And so did Set Piece FC again with our second goal. It was scrappy, it was a bit pinbally, but they all count (after the usual VAR eye roll as we wait for them to find a reason to disallow a goal) and we were ahead pretty early on in the second half through Merino’s quick reactions. I thought he was better in the second half, but looked a little sluggish in the first, so to see him pop up in a good space and set us rolling on the way to another win was very welcome indeed.

As was the third goal. Nwaneri’s cross was decent but half dealt with and Martinelli bagged another one. That’s another player we need to see stepping up and to be fair to him, he did it away to Palace and he did it last night. And after that we did what we do best: make the game boring. Shut down the opposition, keep the defensive shape, do what all teams do to us at the Emirates – say to them “go on then, see if you can break us down”. Brentford couldn’t, a deserved three points was ours and now we look to another tricky away game at the weekend in which we will definitely need to deliver a similar result to keep our title hopes alive.

We’re still in it if we keep this winning run going. It hasn’t been perfect or plain sailing, we certainly still have questions, but if you keep winning football matches the flow starts to kick in and hopefully we can go on another long run like we did last season from January onwards last year.

I’ll leave it there for today and be back to normal service from tomorrow – going to be in Cape Town with signal so will probably start looking ahead to Brighton.

Have yourselves a great day peeps.