UNTOLD ARSENAL

The Curse of Arsenal was placed upon Tottenham Hotspur (the Tiny Totts) following the appalling scenes at the Portsmouth vs Tinies game in which Sol Campbell was abused.   The failure of Tottenham to take any serious action over the incident resulted in the Curse being made official.

As we saw last season (when Birmingham and Milan were cursed) the curse can have dramatic effects, and already this is the case with the Tiny Totts.

Consider first their results

Drew is Wisla Krakow (ok we weren’t really paying attention and hand’t quite got ourselves together by that point.)

The defeats against Hull Stoke and Udinese.

But that’s not all.  Despite having a team low on morale, and a lack of players in suitable positions, David Bentley decided it was a good time to come out and criticise the club (his comments were reprinted in this column a few days back.)  He was dropped completely from the Udinese match.

The Woodgate came out and said that this Tinies team is worse than Leeds, and Leeds went down.

All this - 3 defeats and 2 rebellions - since the Curse was put on Tottenham.  Certainly if the success we had against Birmingham (directors arrested, club up for sale, allegations - totally unproven - of sexual misconduct and financial impropriety, relegation etc)  are anything to go by, this is going to be a fun season for the Tiny Totts.  With Milan we got a couple of defeats that meant that the club are not in the Champions League, and Mr Flamini finds himself spending quite a bit of time on the bench rather than playing (which is what he said he always wanted.)

So there we are.   With a bit of luck the fun is about to start.

Sometimes the Lord Wenger says so much that is right, and so many things move in our favour, it is almost tempting to ask the Lord Wenger to stop talking and the world to stop spinning so we can take it all in.

Just think of yesterday (you remember yesterday, that was the day when the sun came up the time before it came up today).

First, Lord Wenger gave us reasons to be cheerful.  “I would like to give you some reasons to cheer up and be optimistic and to share my optimism with you. I feel the club is well managed financially and I am very proud that we live within the resources we create from our own business.

“The structure of our team is fantastic but very young. That means that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. But today, when you have such a young team, you have to be intelligent. Instead of showing resentment we have to believe in our team more than ever because this team will deliver. But the younger you are the more you need support, and I ask you as well to be proud of them and to show your support.

“At the moment I do not feel that either from the media or our supporters that this team gets the support it deserves. That is why I think they need a stronger guide than ever and I want to get this team to deliver not next year but this year.”

Oh how I agree with that.  Ever since the “we must buy lots of players for lots of money” brigade took over the blogsphere, with their allies, the daily paper journalists, last summer, Arsenal has been on the backfoot - and quite wrongly in my opinion.

Second, as I revealed exclusively (well not quite exclusively, but me and about 100 other blogs and newspapers revealed exclusively) thatDennis Bergkamp wants to come back to us as a coach.  “People ask me the question if I could come back to England one day to coach and I say yes,” he said.   He added that he didn’t want to be manager - just one of the coaching staff.

Third, Eduardo is 3 weeks away from normal training in the team, as 8,498,248 different blogs revealed simultaneously or more or less.  Trouble is, our forward options now include four internationals who can all score lots of goals - and at this moment all four are fit.  Who is going to move aside for the Wonderman.

And if all that weren’t enough we went for a little stroll around a part of Turkey Twizzler Land  that apparently is an invincible fortress, and came out with the goods, while our dear, dear, friends from along the High Road, sort of lost 0-2 in Italy, had that lovely Mr Bentley say that they were a load of turnips (and so didn’t even make the bench) and that fascinating Mr Woodgate say that they were worse than Leeds when they went down (with him).   Oh and they have had 3 players sent off in two games.

So Tottenham are the new Leeds, just like Everton are the new Bolton and life is looking rather jolly ahead of this weekend.

It’s no good, I can’t take all that at once.  And yes, I know we lost two games we should have won, but I still think at this moment this is looking rather good.  I’m sure all the people who thought that we were going to struggle to be 4th this year are pointing at our league position and will be saying, “5th more like”, but to me, this is all looking great.

And I certainly didn’t boo the team against Everton on saturday.