Today, this most holiest of Saints Days – that of the feast of St Totteringham – should be a day of mild celebration and snickering about a club in the mud that can no longer finish above us. It has come rather early this year, but nevertheless, we should be chuckling away at the plight of a team who were telling us that their Australian guy was the latest ‘saviour’ who would win them the Premier League after his first eight matches last season. Instead they are turning on him and his rag-tag bag of misfits as they labour their way to a lower-mid-table finish.

But it can’t be all laughs and giggles for us today. In what is now a recurring incidence for Arsenal fans, the club, the manager and the players, we have to deal with the fallout of another player getting injured, another hamstring going pop and the chances of finishing the season on a high further reduced in probability as a result of this news that Arsenal shared yesterday about Gabriel. It’s a massive blow to all involved in Arsenal and not just because this kid has been our best defender this season, but he’s also a threat from set pieces, a leader in the team and his partnership with Saliba feels like it could become iconic if we can follow up the last few years with silverware. Now we’ll not see that until next season and that makes me sad.

I’m also mad. Frustrated at what feels like an endless flow production of injured players with similar injuries. All hamstrings going pop and the most maddening thing about it all is that there is no real answer that anybody can truly put their finger on. You can’t say that it’s because they are overplayed compared to others, because Saliba, Timber, Rice, etc have all had a large volume of minutes this season. Gabriel, Saka and Havertz are players who are so robust normally. You can’t really say it’s the training because they all do the training and as Mikel said earlier in the season, the problem is not the training but the loading that happens. They don’t give the muscles time to relax because there are so many games. There will be some that say you have to rest players when you can, but how can you rest somebody like Gabriel? Which games could he have been rested in? Perhaps the second leg of PSV? That’s about all I can think of in 2025 and we’ve played 19 games since 1st January. Girona is the other one you could argue the toss over, but that’s still two matches from 19, so that’s still a lot of football for his hammy to go twang.

In the absence of any evidence of universal answer, I fall into the murky world of superstition and once again, find myself saying:

F*ck this f*cking season.

That two-legged tie of Madrid feels like the only thing left we have to focus on. If we go out of that one, the remainder of this season is going to feel very long indeed, because we’ll still have another six Premier League games to go and if we’re out of Europe, we’ll be treading water against the likes of Ipswich, Palace and Bournemouth. Meh.

Mikel will be having his press conference today ahead of the game tomorrow lunchtime and of course he’ll put on a brave face, but I bet he’s investigating a small patch of land at London Colney in which he can grow four leaf clovers, put horseshoes above doors, buy up a collective of rabbits to harvest their feet and asking everyone to bring in a lucky coin to keep in their socks or something on match days – because it feels like we’ll need that based on the season we’ve had.

Or, if you’re like me and you want to believe in karma, what we have gone through this season has re-calibrated some of the previous season’s and next season, I wanna see the footballing gods shine down on us because it’s been a horror of a season, as I mentioned yesterday and so won’t re-write my thoughts on the situation.

Instead, I’m going to focus on this Everton game tomorrow, in which I suspect we’ll get an Everton team who will tuck in and be compact against us, but not as low block as they were at the Emirates earlier in the season. That day they used every trick in the book, but also sat essentially camped in their own box and frustrated us. With them now sitting on 34 points in 15th and a solid 14 off Ipswich in the relegation zone, they’re all but secured safety and so my hope for tomorrow is that they’ll try to be more expansive. Moyes’ natural tendency is to be more cautious and so naturally they’ll have things like inverted wingers, compact back four, Gueye sitting in a defensive midfielder position and they’ll go for long balls over the top to the likes of Beto, but my hope is that we’ll create at least some chances against them. I doubt it’ll be the most classic game in the world, but hopefully it won’t be a complete sh*tefest.

They’ve just lost the Merseyside Derby at Anfield too, so their home fans will be wanting for a bit of a response, I suspect. More on that game tomorrow as we build up to it, but for today I’ll leave you to your respective Friday and hope you have a good one.

Laters.