The North Bank – “It’s got va-va-voom” (An Arsenal blog)

The season starts on Saturday…it starts on Saturday!!!!! How amazing is that? Great… really, err, yeah, brill…ah, who am I kidding? Things are just ludicrous at the moment. My glass has been half empty, then full to the brim, then as I get a slap of reality to the face the glass breaks and all its contents (the last remaining water on Earth) seeps into the sand of the sandiest of deserts. And whose fault is it all? It’s Arsene Wen…I jest. It’s basically my fault for having such an investment in something I can do next to nothing about, apart from scream (sometimes for joy) and moan. But I’m in. There’s no escaping now. Only thing left to do is wait and be optimistic. Maybe weep a little.

Looking at our dead-as-a-doornail transfer activity, one would assume that at any moment Arsene is ready to hatch a master plan so cunning you could dress it up as a lady and sell it to John Terry. But maybe we are all missing the point…all of us – the crowd. Looked at positively, we have ridden ourselves of just about everyone who was considered to be useless. Looking at the list, we can’t deny that it’s been a good summer in that respect. So, that’s positive number one. Secondly, we haven’t lost anyone (significant) – imagine sitting with Arsene as he’s spelling out the reasons you shouldn’t jump off the ledge quite just yet. I see Arsene a bit like Walter White (Heisenberg) from Breaking Bad. If you don’t know the character (get watching), his basic aim in life is to get the people around him to understand that his actions are for the greater good, and especially for the people he cares about the most.

“Now, I get that, Arsene, but please, FFS, sign Luis Suarez right now or I’ll jump, goddamit!” (And I’m in the ‘please don’t sign that wanker’ camp. But I’m desperate).

Gazidis, the man of riddles, has been at it too. When you hear something like: “We can do some things which would excite you. We can think about all kinds of things. We could do that [buy a £20million player], we could do more than that” it really is enough to drive even the most patient of us to despair.

This is the current state of affairs for long-suffering Gooners. However, there may (please sense the irony) be hope. We have a great squad with many players coming through that we would have considered average a season or two ago. With a good non-injury run under our belts (haha, I know), we could put in a solid start to the season, especially with the run of games we are facing.

We have Jack, Theo, Ramsey, Kos, Santi, and the rest, looking like they really can make all the bad stuff go away. That’s what they’re there for, right? To make us happier. I genuinely believe that they want to do so, too. If we could just sneak in a talismanic madman or some unheard of footballing genius just to make our nerves a little less jangly, wouldn’t that be just great? OK, so it’s not going to happen. Wenger’s never going to do something so obvious. But maybe therein lies the answer. Maybe he knows that the team are primed and ready for anything. Maybe they can hold the fort until the end of the transfer window, and just at the final minute he’ll bring in that extra body we need. Yep, that’s Arsene. That has to be the plan. It’d be masochistic if it was anything different (Why go into the season weaker than the last?). If this is the case, my hat will be taken off, screwed to the floor, never to be adorned again – the man would be a bonafide genius in my eyes.

So, in conclusion, maybe we should trust again in the genius that is Arsene Wenger. He has done it before and can do it again. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that all these players have blossomed at the same time and the team is primed and ready to fight on all fronts. If we could do it, the romance would be spectacular. And as Walter White said in a recent episode, “If you don’t know who I am then maybe your best course of action would be to tread lightly.” Substitute “know who I am” with “understand me” and “tread lightly” with “trust me”. Perhaps it’s the last course of action Arsenal fans have left.