WEEKLY TAKES
Job's a good 'un this week
Arsenal have had one of those weeks. You know the one. And honestly, that is the only piece of context I need to feel completely fine about everything else going on right now.
I will not pretend this start to the season has been smooth for us. It has not. New manager, a squad being rebuilt from the ground up, and in the meantime a run of results that has not gone our way. Fine. I have made my peace with it. Anyone who actually understands football knows a transition like this ends in silverware, it is just a question of when.
But then Arsenal go and have a week like this one, and none of that matters to me anymore. Doesn't matter what happened in our own game. Doesn't matter what the table says right now, because we all know that table gets nudged against clubs who actually run things properly. What matters is that up the road, it has been a genuinely rough week to support that club, and I am fully entitled to enjoy it.
This is the part people outside our fanbase never quite get. Job's a good 'un is not really about the football at all. It is a state of mind. It is the warm blanket you wrap yourself in when your own week has gone a bit spursy and you need something, anything, to hold onto. A bad week for Arsenal is the emotional equivalent of finding a tenner in an old coat pocket.
Job's a good 'un. Three of the most beautiful words in the English language, right up there with "clean sheet" and "De Zerbi's philosophy is really starting to click."
And let's be honest about why this keeps happening to them. Big summer, big spending, big talk, and then it all wobbles at the exact moment it matters most. Meanwhile we do things properly. Sensible business, a stadium that makes every other ground in the country look like an afterthought, and supporters who turn up and sing no matter what the officials and the pundits decide to throw at us that week. One of these is a sustainable football club. The other is a soap opera that resets every August. And notice which of the two gets the benefit of every doubt from the people holding the whistles and the microphones. It is never the sustainable one. It was never going to be the sustainable one.
So no, I am not going to sit here and claim everything at Tottenham Hotspur is perfect this week. It is not, not completely, and I will have plenty more to say about the league's ongoing efforts to make our lives difficult another day. But today I am choosing joy. Today I am choosing to look up the road, see a genuinely bad week happening to Arsenal, and let that be enough.
Because it always is. It was enough last season. It will be enough next season. It is, if we are being completely honest, one of the last truly reliable constants left in this sport. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.