ARSENALISM©

   “Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work”-Vince Lombardi Vince Lombardi Head Coach of the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s and one of the great thinkers in sports history had a plethora of quotable adages about team work, sporting excellence, motivation and the qualities in life that count for so much: almost embodying what team sport is all about. Commitment as a group is key, particularly when there are forces massed against you. Enemies from without is to be  expected so Alan Hansen's negativity on MOTD is par for the course particularly given his past status with Liverpool FC (haunted by ghosts of '89 perhaps?). Personally I record or pause MOTD on Sky+ and FF through the inane punditry as I do the commercials, so rarely pay heed to such nonsense. What did make me pause for thought was an interview on ArsenalFanTV with a rather negative Arsenal supporter following our 0-...

GUNNERS KEEP FIRING "Enjoy the moment" That's my current mantra. We are currently riding high and receiving plaudits, and rightly so, for how we have apparently surprised everyone. Yesterday's game against Norwich featured four of the best goals you are likely to see in a game and the defining element in all the strikes was confidence, a level of confidence that we haven't seen in a while. What that's down to is hard to say but clearly the arrival of a genuine world class player has enabled others to have more breathing space and adapt to the challenge of matching the level of quality of our number eleven. Next month there are some mouthwatering fixtures to look forward to and 'looking forward' is the optional phrase as in the past there has been something of a feeling of dread surrounding playing our direct competition. The Liverpool game is a throwback to the era when the two clubs were slugging it out for top spot and Snap's I've Got ...

Resilience: 1.  The power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity. 2.  Ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy Ability takes you far as does team spirit, a little bit of luck: the cliché that is ‘the rub of the green’, but perhaps the most valuable asset for success is resilience. In a league that is very much a marathon not a sprint and in cup competitions where 90 minutes can decide your destiny resilience is key. When we were top of the league and Eduardo was maimed the Arsenal folded. When Newcastle did the unthinkable and overturned a 0-4 lead in minutes the Arsenal crumbled. This time around we seem to have that elusive buoncebackability (a lovely phrase that) that has resulted in a tremendous run of form. The time to collapse was after the loss to Sp*rs or the home loss to Aston Villa, but on both occasions the Arsenal rose to the chall...