Decided to take a few days away from blogging over the weekend. With what happened on Friday night, which I found out about on Saturday morning, totally took me away from any thoughts of writing. I had my parents over for the weekend and as we watched the news on Saturday morning, it didn’t even enter my head that writing about football was something I’ve been doing almost every day for about four years. It all seemed so trivial.

What has happened has put the fear in to a lot of people. Even now, as I hurtle towards London, it makes you wonder where the next strike will come. But as I watched the BBC news last night, there was a young lady interviewed who spoke quite profoundly about living. About life and how it simply must go on. We cannot be ruled by fear. We must not. The unification of most of the world against such atrocities as we saw in Paris is exactly what everybody needs. We need to be united as a collective of people, get on with our lives, appreciate our lives and those close to us.

As far as football goes, I haven’t really kept up with any of it if I’m honest with you. I know that Gibbs didn’t play for England, which pretty much rules out any interest in my national team with all the other injuries we have, yet Santi did play and score. That will hopefully do him good after his dizzy episode and hopefully we can see him return to his best on Saturday. Koscienly played the whole match against Germany, whilst Giroud got in most of the game, but I’d imagine that there was little on their minds after being so close to the explosions. We can only be thankful that the policing/stewarding for the game appears to have worked, as the terrorists could not gain entry in to the stadium and cause more damage to fans and maybe even the players. 

Perhaps a question will also be raised over the mental state and wellbeing for the players too? They will have been at the heart of a terrorist attack and if I was a footballer in a game in which I feel like I could have been killed, it would inevitably affect my psychological state. From my own fan perspective, I’m looking at large clusters of people getting together being at football matches, so are English – and London clubs given the higher density of people – more likely to be targeted?

It is disgusting that these thoughts have even been pushed to mine, possibly yours too, mindset. These people who commit these crimes are cowards. They are not waging a holy war. I had my haircut on Saturday and the Muslim man who cut my hair was more outraged than anybody else. These people are committing double atrocities by naming their evil under the religion of Islam, he said, and he’s exactly right. It’s people like those terrorists who make life all the harder for perfectly decent people like Haman. They do nothing for anybody except cause pain. 

Sorry, went off piece with that little rant, but it’s horrible that anybody has lost their lives innocently.

Back to Arsenal – in which I can certainly feel happier about – and it looks like we’ll be in good shape if we can get through these latest round of internationals over the next 48 hours. Cech didn’t play I believe at the weekend, Bellerin has been injured but will return, Özil has been rested and Mertesacker is retired from internationals, Monreal, Arteta, Flamini and Coquelin aren’t considered and the Ox should return from injury too. So there’s a decent chunk of our team who will be hopefully quite well rested. The manager will need to make a call on the French players and their mental state, but hopefully we’ll see no new injuries tomorrow night and all of the players can be sensible in the game. Something tells me there won’t be the same level of intensity as there might have been for both sides, had Friday’s events not occurred.

Anyway, that’s enough from me, hope you and your family are well.