Morning all.

So, here we are again. Nothing. There’s no Bruno Guimaraes news – no bid, no “talks progressing”, not even a lazily-sourced “Arsenal are monitoring the situation” to chew on over a coffee. And then yesterday Sky went and confirmed the thing a few of us had already quietly braced ourselves for: Vinicius Junior is staying at Real Madrid. New deal, silly money, Mourinho wants him, Perez wants him. That’s that, then.

Three days ago I was making the case for him and recalibrating the dream XI like everyone else. Now the window’s gone flat again. So rather than bash out my four hundredth blog of the summer about how we need to spend some faaaakin’ money, I thought I’d do something a bit different today.

My mate Darren Berry has written a book – Arsenal – Champions Again Olé Olé, out through Legends Publishing – and he asked me to review it. I’ve read the lot. Here’s what I made of it.

He nearly didn’t write it at all

The best thing about this book is the reason it almost didn’t exist.

Back in November, with us top of the league and the North London Derby coming up, Darren’s publisher messaged asking if he fancied writing something about “the season you may actually win something”. His reaction was pure football supporter: absolutely not, because writing a book about the season would jinx it.

His rule, in capital letters, was: DO NOT WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THE FOOTBALL SEASON.

I loved that he opened with this, because it made me feel completely seen. We all do it. The lucky pants, the same pub, the same seat, the same walk from the tube. We know it’s nonsense. We do it anyway. As Darren puts it, logic and football supporters don’t exactly go hand in hand.

What he did instead is clever. He wrote it in what he calls “going all Netflix on you” – starting at the end, flashing back to August, then jumping forward to a present day that was actually last November. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does, because you’re reading a bloke who doesn’t know how it ends, right up until the point where he does.

That’s the whole trick of the book. It isn’t a history written by someone who already knows we won it. It’s the nine months, in real time, with all the terror still in them.

The anxiety chapter is the best thing in it

There’s a section called “Moments” that I’d recommend to anyone, whether they support Arsenal or not.

Darren writes very openly about anxiety – the medication, the meditation, the lot – and how it taught him to stop and take a moment. Then he applies that to being an Arsenal fan in a title race. Football is supposed to be the escape from the real world, and somewhere along the way, for a lot of us, it stopped being one.

I liked where Darren talked about learning to appreciate the moments – Raya’s save against Brighton, the injury-time winner against Wolves, Rice chasing Harry Kane down and the whole ground going up – because it made me feel less mad about how much of last season I spent worrying instead of enjoying. He’s right. If we hadn’t won it, none of those moments would have counted. Because we did, every one of them was part of it.

His line about the Premier League trophy being a massive pair of noise-cancelling headphones is one I’ll be nicking, by the way.

The bit that got me

I wasn’t expecting a football book to knock me sideways, but there’s a chapter about his mate Gary Read – Gaz – who died last year at 46, before he got to see us do it.

Darren’s own tribute is lovely, but what makes it is that he hands the page over to Gaz’s mates and lets them all have a go. Some of it’s heartbreaking. Some of it’s exactly what you’d say about a bloke who’d taken the mickey out of you for a decade. One of them calls him the friendliest, most caring, funny, miserable so-and-so you’d ever meet, and you can hear him saying it.

I liked where Darren wrote about watching the 2014 FA Cup final with Gaz – every emotion a supporter feels in a lifetime, crammed into 120 minutes – because it made me think about the people I sit near in Block 5 and the ones I’ve shared this with over the years. That’s the actual thing, isn’t it? The football’s the excuse. The people are the point.

And then, because football is football, Eze gets paraded on the pitch on the very day Gaz’s family were there – and Gaz had a soft spot for Palace. You couldn’t write it.

The good, silly stuff

It’s not all heavy. It’s very funny.

Max Dowman is never just Max Dowman – he’s 15-YEAR-OLD MAX DOWMAN, then 16-YEAR-OLD MAX DOWMAN, always in capitals, and it gets funnier every time. There’s “Thursday’s Best Team in the World”. There’s a bit where he considers doing a North London Derby without a drink and concludes it’s like cutting your hands off to see how you cope brushing your teeth.

Best of all is the “Receipts Kept” box at the end of every month, where he simply prints what the pundits said and lets them hang themselves. Jamie O’Hara reckoning we invented the long throw. Joe Hart openly wanting City to win it. Martin Samuel crowning Liverpool in September. No commentary needed.

The chapter I didn’t expect

Darren worked as a stadium tour host at the Emirates for three years, and he writes about his last shift.

I liked where he talked about the fella from the States who sat in the dugout and burst into tears because visiting the Emirates was his lifelong dream, and about giving a terminally ill man called George the full VIP treatment – because it made me feel guilty about how easily I take it for granted. I moan about the queue for the tube. Some people save for years just to stand in an empty stadium.

Perry Groves – who also writes the foreword, drawing a neat parallel between what George Graham did in 1986 and what Arteta has done – tells him at the end of that last shift: “Don’t look back, Daz. No tears.”

Worth your money?

Yes. Easily.

If you want tactical breakdowns and xG charts, this isn’t it, and Darren tells you so up front. What you get instead is what it actually felt like to be an Arsenal supporter through those nine months. The fear, the pettiness, the daft superstitions, the hatred coming at us from every direction, the mates who weren’t there to see it, and then that Tuesday night in May when City drew at Bournemouth and 22 years just… stopped.

The last third, where he opens it up to Gooners around the world – a 75-year-old dad in tears in a pub, a woman refreshing score apps in California, a lass in a Brooklyn bar with Spike Lee – is worth it on its own.

Get it bought. It’s a proper Arsenal book, written by a proper Arsenal fan.

Right – back to refreshing the transfer news tomorrow. Something’s got to give eventually.