3-1 to the Arsenal

“At the moment, there is pressure on Villa, on us and everybody. We have to come back as quickly as possible.”

- Arsene Wenger, I can't remember where but probably The Times

It's been a long time since we had a 3-1 scoreline. Around six months ago, we were bitching about how we played fluidly going forward and scored freely, but spoilt our attacking endeavour by conceding weak goals at the back. And then Hull happened, then Sp*rs, and then to top it all off, we were left with a catatonic side without a Catalan in sight.

And we realised (or at least I realised) that you can take attacking, kamakazi football for granted. I wouldn't mind going back to the days when we won 3-1 three out of four games and lost the other one 0-1 from a corner. At least then, we were playing pretty football.

I saw twenty minutes of the WBA game, and we didn't do too badly. WBA defended poorly, and so did we. WBA played poorly, and so did we. We did manage to score three times, though, so it was palatable. Our passing was poor and often misdirected, and we really didn't have many ideas. Still, we won. And winning ugly is enough.

I'm hoping rather ferverently that this 3-1 win will inspire our boys to score more goals. Football matches much, much easier to win when you're scoring goals. In fact, I'd say that the secret to good football can be encapsulated with two directives: 1) score more goals than the opposition, and 2) don't play Eboue. We managed to do the first one this match, and I'm confident we'll be able to accomplish both in the coming weeks.

We're getting a bucketload of players back from injury.

Walcott's aiming to come back for the Roma game. And Adebayor and Eduardo and Cesc are coming back in the weeks ahead. If you add a fully fit Arshavin to the mix, we've got a potentially potent attacking line-up re-emerging at the Arsenal. It's probably still not going to be enough to save 4th place, but you never know.

As Wenger put it, we just have to come back as soon as possible.