There’s not much of a better feeling in the world than to soundly dispatch the hated Pond Life, is there? Well, I can think of a few unrelated to football, but not many.

For 42 minutes, I really had a bad feeling about the way the match was going. Although they didn’t seem to threaten much, Spurs seemed to be enjoying their ability to break up our fluid passing game. But the memo they didn’t get, is that this season, unlike seasons past… we don’t always need to have our passing game on full click to be dangerous. And finally, at 42′… Bacary Sagna put in a low cross from the right and Robin van Persie used his catlike agility to step alongside the defense and right foot it home for our first. It felt great, but I felt we needed more to settle my nerves, especially after the 4-4 fiasco of last season.

Our Captain must have been thinking along the same lines, because they still hadn’t finished showing highlights of Robin’s goal when the announcer burst in with “And, here’s Fabregas!…” and they cut back to live action just in time to see Cesc Fabregas striding across the edge of the area with two Spud defenders closing in, but too late… he slotted home neatly into the bottom left. 2-0! Two goals in 50 seconds! The replay showed that seconds after the restart, there was a mistimed pass by Tottenham which caromed off one of our players when Cesc picked it up and danced around two of the opposition before letting fire. How good does he feel today? His first North London Derby as Arsenal Captain, and he simply eviscerated the entire Tottenham side to score on a solo effort. Now that’s what I call sticking it to them. Way to go, Cesc!

And, as great as it felt to go into the tunnel up 2-0, I still felt we needed more. I hate to admit it, but this Tottenham side is playing better than the one that we drew with last season at home. We couldn’t let them get a toehold. We needed at least one more to end it. Preferably two. And that’s just what happened at 60′ after a bit of confusion as we moved up the right side. The touchline official called for a foul, gesticulating wildly, which made both offense and defense take pause. But when it was clear the ref was not stopping and to play the advantage, Bacary & Robin repeated their efforts of 20′ earlier by crossing in and Robin tapping it home for our third. How that ball got through not only Gomes, but a Spud defender, I’ll never know. But Robin was waiting on the other side to finish the match off. A brace for the Flying Dutchman!

Great match and a great effort by the Arsenal. This is the sort of thing I love to see from them. When it looks like things aren’t quite going their way, they still dig deep and find a way to go forward and win. And in such an important match for us. We sit soundly in third place in the league, still with a game in hand. Assuming we get three points from that match, that puts us in second by goal differential, and only two points off the leaders. I haven’t checked yet, and I know we’re the highest scoring team in the league so far, but we must be breaking some records with this per game goal average. We’re positively free-scoring now. If we can put a nice string of clean sheets together too, we’ll be in fat city.

COME ON YOU GUNNERS!