Good morning, welcome to Monday. It’s like being in an Interlull at the moment because of the lack of Arsenal. As I said yesterday, I didn’t watch the EFL Cup final and on Friday’s Arsecast I even predicted the way it would be won – with a late Zlatan goal.

I think I said it would be in the 78th minute, and it came in the 87th minute, but still. Then Manchester United celebrated because they’d won a trophy. Wasn’t Twitter ‘on fire’ though with all the ‘Look at them celebrating the EFL Cup, LOL’ stuff?

It’s funny, because I’m quite sure that if we’d been in a cup final and won it we’d also have celebrated. Sure, there’d be the usual crew of never-happies who would say ‘Yeah, it’s the EFL Cup, celebrate that if you’re a small-time idiot’, but then those people ought to slapped across the belly with a wet fish until they have a big red slapped fish belly.

It’s a final, and you won. What are you supposed to do other than celebrate? You can enjoy winning the cup while at the same time recognising that it is the least important of the four trophies on offer. But even then having to compartmentalise it and justify it in that context seems wrong.

If football is about winning things – and that applies to tackles, headers, moments in games, matches, leagues, and finals – then why wouldn’t you just enjoy that? I don’t get the need to constant dismiss things simply because they don’t conform with your too-cool-for-school world view.

This is coming dangerously close to a defence of Manchester United, and I think you all know that’s not where I’m going, but if you’re an Arsenal fan of a certain vintage you’ll remember the 1987 League Cup final against Liverpool. It had been 8 years since our last trophy win, that classic FA Cup in 1979.

After that there was the 1980 FA Cup loss to West Ham (ed: too soon) and the Cup Winners Cup loss on penalties to Valencia just four days later (ed: TOO SOOOOONN!), and then nothing but wilderness and tumbleweeds in terms of trophies.

Liverpool were still the dominant force in the English game and favourites on the day, but in the 83rd minute Perry Groves crossed for Charlie Nicholas, his shot deflected and squirted across the line to win the game for us and they did their little dance. I know football was different then, I know the circumstances were different too, but it still felt great, and I think any fan who can’t let themselves enjoy that is doing themselves a disservice.

Of course there are ‘gags’ to be made about spending the money United have and only having a league cup to show for it, but it’s still a cup and winning it is good. I mean, did the ‘It’s only the League Cup’ point of view make what happened against Birmingham in 2011 feel better? I would respectfully suggest that it did not.

Anyway, all that unpleasantness out of the way, what else is there to talk about this morning? The top 6 is getting very tight now. Sp*rs beat an abject Stoke yesterday leading to many questions and think-pieces asking ‘What is the point of Stoke?’, and the the main conclusion is that there is none at all. Top scientists and philosophers have all come to that same conclusion and suggested there should be a vote to do away with Stoke altogether.

Liverpool play Leicester tonight and if they win they go above us. On the one hand you don’t want that to happen for that very reason; on the other it would be nice to see the treacherous miscreants who back-stabbed Claudio Ranieri lose every game between now and the end of the season and get relegated and never come back or perhaps sent to Stoke before it’s abolished.

Next Saturday we play at 5.30 (grrr) and Man Utd play Bournemouth at Old Trafford at 3pm so unless a Jack Wilshere masterclass helps the visitors get something there, we could be in 6th place before we travel to Anfield. Given that there’s already a lot of pressure on us, this would just add to that ahead of what is going to be a fairly seismic fixture in our wobbly season.

It’s a good job that we are so incredibly well able to deal with high pressure situations.

Right, not much else going on, but James and I will be here later on with an Arsecast Extra. If you have any questions or topics for discussion, please send to @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra and we’ll get to as many as we can. There’s not much going on this week, so be creative!

Podcast will be up before lunchtime, so until then have a good one.

UPDATE

I just remembered that today is Arseblog’s birthday. We are 15 today.

15.

The very first post was made on this day in 2002.  Where the hell has all the time gone? As ever when we reach a milestone like this all I can do is thank you all for reading, listening, commenting, Twitter and Facebooking and all the rest.

It’s hugely appreciated, and the feedback and support in all the way its given is fantastic. A lot of ups and downs in that time, but I guess that’s football and, most specifically, Arsenal.

Who knows where we’ll be in 15 years?! So much will have changed, the world, football, the players, but I’m sure that the reassuring presence of Arsene Wenger as manager will be a real comfort to us all.

Thanks again everyone, and cake for breakfast it is!