Arsenal 4 – Fulham Reserves 0: Four-Star Gunners End Season on Positive Note

Too little, too late, obviously, but it’s a positive nonetheless. The first time we’ve beaten a league opponent by more than two goals since December. The first time we’ve scored 4 goals in a league match since January. And the first time we’ve won a match in any competition in over a month.

I didn’t see the match — I was busy freezing my ass off watching the other sports team that’s my love/passion/bane of my existence, the New York Mets, lose a late-inning game. Good times all around.

I can’t say too much about it. Arshavin opened by scoring the ultimate Arshavin goal — he showed some brilliant hustle and creativity to steal the ball from Schwarzer, get around him, and then, instead of passing the ball to a wide open Robin van Persie who would have definitely, 100% scored, Arshavin decided to take on a defender one-on-one and shoot from a very difficult angle. It perfectly illustrates the “Arshavin paradox” — no other member of the team would have failed to set up van Persie for what would have been an easy goal there; but no other member of the team would have even found himself in that situation in the first place. It was selfish and stupid, but at the same time it was clever and brilliant — I don’t know, you figure it out, but it was a goal, and that can’t ever be a bad thing. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point one thing out — look at the other players on the team’s body language after Arshavin scored. It seems like they’ve decided to celebrate his goals as vigorously as he celebrates theirs.

The second one was a real team effort. Sagna did well to cut in, and used his left foot to send an inch perfect through ball to Theo Walcott, who made a perfectly timed run to get onto it and cross it beautifully to van Persie, whose shot ricocheted off the crossbar. Fortunately, it ricocheted directly backed to him, and he finished it very well. 2-0 Arsenal. Then, before the half, under more pressure for Arsenal, Fulham defender Chris Baird scored a pretty bad own goal to make it 3-0.

Then, Robbie should have had another one after the break, but hit the post. Finally, in the 86th minute, Carlos Vela got onto a perfect through ball to go in one on one, and did very well to chip Schwarzer. It was a top-class finish of the kind that’s tantalized us about Vela for the past couple of seasons. It was his only his second goal of the season (the previous one came in the Carling Cup) and only his second ever goal in the Premiership. With his Arsenal future under review, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

And that’s it. I haven’t seen any extended highlights, but all the stats make it sound like we dominated the match, as we should have against a team made up of mostly reserves who were looking ahead to the Europa League final on Wednesday. And here’s a video of the lap of appreciation:

It’s hard to say what my favorite part of this is:

1. Seeing Eboue with all his kids, who seem to need constant reminders of where they are and where they’re supposed to be going. Chips off the old block, eh?!

2. Seeing (I think) Bendtner wearing a stupid cap and an Arsenal blanket like a sari. Better than no pants at all, I suppose.

3. Seeing Gunnersaurus walking with the players, and trudging along forlornly like he’d just played 120 minutes and lost an extra-time thriller.

Well, that’s really it for now, I suppose. Congrats to Chelsea for winning the league. No matter what I’ve said about them (and I’ve just about said it all), they were definitely the best team in the Premiership over the course of the season. And at least it wasn’t effing United again, which would have been intolerable. Congrats also to Spurs for qualifying for the Champions League, they certainly deserve it. Although I wish you could bet on things like “Spurs will spend £40 million over the summer to strengthen their Champions League prospects, only they’ll lose to a team like Sevilla, Sampdoria, Lyon, or Werder Bremen in the playoff, meaning they won’t get the financial windfall of the group stage, then they’ll go into a financial tailspin, and Redknapp will leave the financial husk of yet another club in his wake and move on to ruin someone else.” And also, big ups to Wolves and especially Brum for staying up after being promoted from the Championship last season. As Walter Sobchak would say, “worthy fucking adversaries.” Finally, congrats to Newcastle and West Brom for riding the yo-yo back up to the Premiership — the league will be a better place for having both of those clubs in it next season.

Thanks also to all you regular and irregular readers and commenters — the side has had its most successful season ever according to the three commonly-used metrics: (1) most comments; (2) most pageviews; and (3) most times criticizing Andrey Arshavin and praising Nicklas Bendtner. Cheers for that — I’ll keep writing if you keep reading and commenting. Loads and loads of end of the season stuff coming up this week, so stay tuned for that, as well as summer transfer window preview stuff.

One last time before I retire it, for old time’s sake:

And finally, I close every season with this. It’s a quote from noted writer and baseball fan Roger Angell, and it is the best description I have yet come across about what it means to passionately follow a sports team:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

And so another season comes to an end. We didn’t win anything. But we cared — oh, how we cared — and that caring involved singing and yelling with joy, high-fiving and hugging complete strangers with whom we had only one apparent thing in common, as well as slumping backwards and audibly groaning, hands on head in despair. Is there anything else in your life that brings such raw, emotional displays to the surface? There isn’t for me. So for as much as Arsenal frustrates me at times, I love the club more than ever — in fact, I love the club more now than I did 6 or 7 years ago when they were winning — and I can’t wait for another season of naivete to start in earnest in August.

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Category: Arsenal News, Fixtures, Fulham, Match Review, Premiership