Morning folks. Happy Sunday, or is it Saturday? Or Tuesday? Thursday? Who knows any more, eh?

Today I am mostly thinking about what football means to me and what I’ll feel like when it returns. Right now I don’t feel like I’ve missed it that much, so the noises that ‘Project Restart’ will commence from 8th June is giving me an opportunity to reflect on that fact it’ll be back in my life soon. I’m certainly not craving it and with the noises coming out from the media that it’ll be at neutral venues and played behind closed doors, I wonder if it’ll even look and feel like the Premier League.

How can you add drama by watching football where there are no fans, no atmosphere and what feels like no intensity in matches?

It’s going to look really weird. It’s going to feel like the rest of the season will be one long training session. It’ll be like watching the players knock the ball around at London Colney and if that’s the case then I don’t think it’ll help my desire for getting back into the swing of football.

Imagine Arsenal were actually playing for something  other than a Europa League spot. And even that is hardly a massively exciting prospect. Most of us can’t stand the competition anyway until it gets to the latter stages and this season we totally sh*t the bed anyway, so the way I feel now I don’t really care about whether we’re in it or not. But I understand the financial implications of not being in it. It would be catastrophic for the club I’d imagine, especially when you think about the fact that we already have the implications of the current global pandemic that is going to batter Arsenal’s finances. So whilst there are clearly incentives for the players and staff at Arsenal to get us climbing the table, from a footballing perspective, I really couldn’t give a monkeys if we qualified for the competition or not.

Which is why I think it’s going to be hard to get into the swing of this ‘new normal’ in terms of the football. The atmosphere won’t be there, the prizes probably won’t be on show, the intensity won’t be there and we’ll probably end up playing a season petering out to nothing anyway.

Apologies folks. I know this is a bit of a negative blog today – or it seems like it – but I don’t feel negative in my own mind. I’m just, well, nonplussed about football at the moment. It’d why I’ve scaled the blogging right back too, to be honest with you, because I get up and just can’t be bothered to talk about football and about Arsenal specifically. And so I wonder how many more people are looking at football in the same way? IT’s a big business with lots of money ploughed into it, but it’s the fans who pay the big bulk of cash and if more fans are a little more like me when it comes to thinking about football, then I wonder whether football has a recovery operation that need to take place which is a little more than just clawing back cash because of the TV sponsorship deals.

Football might need to make people like me fall in love with it again. And lets face it, the money, the way in which some clubs behave, the billionaires, the exorbitant wages, the corruption at places like FIFA, the whole football bubble – it all contributes towards me loving it a little less and less.

So I have to find out why I fell in love with football in the first place in the 80s. What was making me love it in latter years was the camaraderie of going to see the lads – Giles, Mark, Andrew, Steve, Kevin, Dave, Tom, etc. But that’s not going to be something that I have to fall back on any time soon. So I need to start going back to my own basics I think. Start to remember what got me playing it, why I started to appreciate it and then how it came to a point at which it was an obsession. Which led me to The Arsenal.

That’ll be the focus of the next few weeks I think. But what about you? Where’s your head at? Interested to get some thoughts in the comments so share ’em if you got ’em.

Laters folks.