Is this Arsenal’s best start of the season ever? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

Three wins and a draw in Europe to kick off the season – is that our best start?  Actually it isn’t, but I just wanted to make the point about how silly all the knocking stuff is.

Before Wenger there was no regular European service at Highbury – under Rioch we made the didddly widdddly cup that we now laugh at the Tinies for being in, on the last day of the season.  Under Graham, sometimes we did it, sometimes we didn’t.

Now we are there, and in a week when Manchester City had a player seemingly forget where the pitch was (“all a misunderstanding” apparently), and then lose, and Man U and Chelsea draw, we won.

Not that you would know this from the press.  Nor would you know that this was a game with over 30 attempts on goal.  (If football in reverse with the team bus parked is known as Notlob, this must be Bolton – err, perhaps not – but it was attacking all the time).

OK not stunning – bit of a laugh really, but I have witnessed the goal by the youngest ever Englishman to score in the Champs League, and a game that just didn’t stop.  This was football – crazy, exciting, engaging, fun, nerve racking, football like I seem to remember it from the old days.  This was (from where I was sitting) a ref who utterly and totally lost it, and two teams who thought that defence was a dirty word.

Oh yes and I have now even heard the Arsenal crowd cheer and applaud because a big central defender (one of ours) hoofed the ball right up the field just to get rid of it.  Mr Wenger must have been having nightmares in the stand.   It was a bit like Arsenal under Billy Wright only with talent.

And what of Arsène and his new find: Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – snigger snigger, Arsenal claim to have bought a  player for £10m and he is just a kid.  We want a 27 year old!!!   We want to spend billions.  We want big players.

Yeah, well, I like some of these young players.  At least the Guardian regained a little of their composure this week by recognising that this is the era of “financial madness”.  Thank you, at last for seeing what is going on.  And apparently Alex is the guy that Terry Enry fella said we should sign.  “Ox in the box”.  Ho ho.

And we have done all this with our best players buggering off to foreign parts (well Manchester has never looked very English to me, except for the rain), and everyone else injured or being rested ahead of the Tinies on Sunday.

In the league our start to the season is nowhere near as bad as that collapse that Chelsea had last season – which if you remember was the season in which the journalists told us that it was all over by the end of September because Chelsea were going to walk it.  Even if we lose to the Tinies on Sunday (and of course like everyone else I desperately hope not, and I will be very despondent if this were to happen) we will still be doing far better than Chelsea did in that run last season.

Real supporters – I mean really real supporters – go to the matches if they can, and support and support and support.  If you don’t have a ticket you shout your support at the TV screen, as I did last week for the Notlob game.  We support the players, the manager, and the club.  That is what support means.

Those of us lucky to have tickets did it again last night, and from the noise all around the ground I think most of us quite enjoyed it.

More of the same on Sunday please.  And, does anyone know when Appy Arry’s court case starts.  Must be soon, surely.

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