Arsenal's next few months could be special so let's enjoy the ride 

Here's the brilliant Henry Waddon who urges Gooners to get behind Mikel Arteta's trophy-chasing Arsenal side in what could be a momentous season 

The Days are Getting Longer

As is all-too-often the case, I spent the ninety minutes in which Arsenal played football this past Saturday in my all-too-familiar, chipped-paint, over-used, suffocating, red-and-white echo chamber. But as I stepped out of my front-door, with a distasteful, disdainful, chip-firmly-on-my-shoulder attitude after a four-nil drubbing of Leeds (queue Joy Division), I noticed something. 

The day hadn’t yet gotten away from me. There was still some sunlight in the late January sky as a five o’clock shadow threatened to cast itself over my post-industrial, post-truth, post-hope town. 

The days are getting longer. 

We are emerging from the endless Sunday afternoon that is the fixture-congested, injury-laiden, optimism-zapping drabness of British January, with the neon-soaked, bass-pounding, golden-hazed, endless Saturday evening of May firmly in our sights.

I am guilty, like so many of us, of failing at enjoyment. Failing at cheer, failing at perspective. I have done so much nail-biting and jaw-clenching these past weeks. I have stared wistfully at the Premier League table, oblivious to the points tallies staring back at me, and mourning every lost dual and miskick that led to us to not being ten, or fifteen, or twenty points clear by now. 

But the days are getting longer. 

We know that, as of right this very second, we are the very best footballing team in the country, and possibly in Europe. The numbers in the tables and the lines on the graphs certainly tell us that. 

It is simply the players’ job to go out and prove it in every game between now and the end of the season. And it is simply our job, as fans, to enjoy ourselves as they do. To be loud and break things. To back them, to appreciate their endeavour and their quality. And to do our best to savour it. 

As the final whistle blew under the lights at the Emirates, and as the curtain came down on our soul-tearing tie against United, a tiny, wound-up minority of the Arsenal faithful opted to boo our players. Opted to boo a team that is top of the Premier League, and of the Champions League, and is still firing on all fronts in both domestic cup competitions.

You don’t know you’re living in the good old days when you’re in them. You only recognise them when you’re squinting back at them in the rear view mirror, stuck in the quagmire of a dreary, disappointing future. 

We were there for the Wenger-Out days, and the Unai-sponsored drudgery of Watford and Baku. We are so, so, so, so far from that trough now. And yet still we are ungrateful and unsatiated.

Who knows what the next four months have in store for us… but you and I both know that it could be special.

Unprecedented, even. So why not try to enjoy it? Why not back the team to our absolute fullest? Lord knows they need it, and it may even make the difference in the tiny, tiny, tiny margins that could take us from the nearly-men and also-rans of the past three years, to the zenith we are all dreaming about. 

These are the good, old days. And there are better ones literally just ahead of us; the days are getting longer. 

Go well.