This Arsenal team is REALLY good. Like, REALLY good you know.

I was proper nervous about yesterday. Brighton have lost one game at home all season. Liverpool could only manage a draw. The Scum got beat there. Only West Ham have picked up maximum points at the Amex and even that was a smash and grab effort earlier in the season. If Arsenal were going to keep our hopes of competing right to the end of the season, we were going to have to do something that many teams just fail to do: beat De Zerbi and his players on their own turf.

I said beforehand that I thought the game would be tight; Brighton are a possession-based side who will have more of the ball and I suspect would make it difficult for us in both thirds. I thought they would be compact and then hit us with pace through our flanks and with Zinchenko named as our left back, it felt like we could be left exposed on turnovers.

But I need to realise just how good we are at the moment. Because although we looked a little nervous to start off with and there were a few misplaced passes that we saw from Gabriel and Raya early on, we were creating chances. And good chances at that. Within ten minutes Gabriel had headed agonisingly wide from a free kick, Saka had drifted a ball wide from an angle that you normally expect him to score, Jesus had mis-timed a header, he’d forced a good save from Vergruggen, as well as Havertz nearly pouncing on a miscommunication between Dunk and his ‘keeper. After the initial nervy couple of passes, we took control of the game and now with the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen exactly how this game would pan out: Arsenal in complete control.

So when Jesus was brought down by Lamptey in the box for our penalty that Saka duly dispatched, the game was practically won there and then. A third in to the match and Arsenal had their opponents beat.

Of course you don’t know that in the heat of the moment. Football is a game of variables and so quite easily things can turn on a knife edge; a red card, an injury, a mistake, etc. But with the way this Arsenal team is playing – particularly how we are defensively – providing you can control some of those aforementioned variables, when we go ahead we tend to win football matches. I saw a tweet from Sam Dean of the Telegraph which summed it up perfectly:


We just don’t give away chances. In 2024 we have allowed practically nothing and whilst when you’re live and in the moment you don’t look at these types of data points, when you look at it in the cold light of day, you realise just how good this Arsenal team is defensively.

But that’s only one half of the story, because offensively we are really good too. Yesterday we restricted Brighton to just two attempts on target, but in attack we had 20 shots in total and seven on target. This Arsenal team is as clinical in attack as they are miserly in defence. That is a winning combination and it turned what promised to be a very uncomfortable afternoon on the South Coast, to one in which on the hour mark it was all but over. And Brighton knew it too as soon as Havertz ghosted in to the box to double our advantage. That’s nine goals and four assists in the Premier League this season and as I said on the Same Old Arsenal pod that we recorded this morning, I am officially on the Kai Havertz Apology Tour now, because he is delivering the goods and is looking so impressive right now. He picked up the man of the match award and it was thoroughly deserved, because not only did he tuck away his goal really well to secure all three points, but he also racked up an assist for Trossard by the end of the game too. I was pleased that Trossard scored it as well, because he’d been given a fair bit of stick from the Brighton fans, so to see him add the cherry on the cake with a brilliant finish like he did yesterday was amazing to watch. That’s eight goals this season in the Premier League for Trossard too – talk of us needing a striker is redundant when you have players like him who are contributing with such regularity.

And that is the case for this whole Arsenal side. We have scored 75 goals this season. SEVENTY FIVE. That is a phenomenal return for a team who were being accused of bus parking last weekend. Last season we got 88 goals across 38 games. We have to get another 13 to match that this season in our next seven games, so that’s just under two per match, which you certainly wouldn’t put it past this Arsenal team. But the difference from this season to last season? We conceded 43 goals in the whole season last year. This year we have conceded 24. So unless we experience one heck of a collapse and let in 19 goals in 7 games, we’ll most probably have a better attack than last season and a better defence too. That’s 14 clean sheets this season and that is the kind of numbers that you expect from a team winning the league.

I’m not ready to admit or even properly think about that yet though. We still have the hardest run in of all of the teams in this Premier League title race, we still have an incredibly hard April that includes Bayern Munich home and away, we can still have something go wrong. But up until this point and with the way this Arsenal team are playing right now, we are the best team in the league. We are the form team in the league. We are looking imperious.

Of course Man United will do us no favours today when they play Liverpool at Old Trafford, we all know that, but we are doing everything in our power to stay in contention and right now this Arsenal team is absolutely purring. And so am I, because the football is great to watch, the unity and togetherness of this team is great to watch, the atmosphere is amazing at the Emirates, the away fans are as loud as I’ve ever heard and we are rocking. I’m running out of superlatives to describe this Arsenal team. Long may that continue.

Catch you all tomorrow.