Arsenal fans know the drill on substitutions:the first one between 67 and 70 minutes and not a minute earlier. That’s the Wenger way. Usually just one at this early stage but sometimes two, with the others following on anything up to the 90th minute. It doesn’t seem to make much difference to Arsene whether the…

Have I mentioned I hate most football stats? I think I may have. Mostly they are meaningless tosh that have no bearing on anything. Whenever someone tweets a stat onto my twitter timeline like this one:I think ‘Meaningless stat’. Then I start singing in my head, ‘Meaningless stats in very high voices’, because the phrase…

Here’s the result of today’s 12-hour poll. Who would have guessed that Arsenal fans would think Tony Pulis was the most annoying manager? But it’s a measure of how far we’ve fallen that Arsene himself is seen as nearly twice as annoying as Sam Allardyce. Because to be honest Sam Allardyce annoys the crap out…

As a result of a twitter conversation in which Martin Jol was called rude names, here’s a quick poll to find out if he is in fact more annoying than the likes of Mark Hughes and Sam Allardyce. Not that I want to lead you to vote a particular way. Never tried this poll functionality…

Here’s a table of trophy winners since 2005-06. I’m fairly sure about the wage figures, but if I’ve made an error please point it out – with a link to the correct information. If you add in net transfer spend, Liverpool were also bigger spenders than Arsenal in 2012, but not in 2006 or 2009.…

I must say I have long been in the camp with a big flag flying saying “Walcott’s not worth it. Let him go if he wants to. We can spend the money better elsewhere.” Like I said, it’s a big flag. But I must admit he is looking more convincing in front of goal recently,…

I’ve recently been reading ‘Herbert Chapman on Football’, a collection of the great man’s newspaper columns from his time as Arsenal manager. I’m not even half way through yet, but the man’s genius shines through from almost every page. He introduced so many things that are taken for granted now, because we have all grown…

Plenty of referring controversy this weekend. Arteta was offside for Arsenal’s goal; Hernandez was offside for one of Man Utd’s goals; Suarez had a goal ruled out for an offside that wasn’t; Torres was sent off with a second yellow for diving; Valencia was also booked for diving in the same game; Ivanovic was sent…

I was going to go into some detail about the goings on at today’s Arsenal AGM, but as I was pondering the performance of the various Arsenal Board members who took an active part, something struck me: the problem with Stan Kroenke is he doesn’t get what it means to be a football fan. Stan…

Here’s a feature on Olivier Giroud from The Times last Friday. Last Friday, of course, things looked a bit rosier for Gooners than they do now. Since then we have had two defeats where we managed one shot on target, a speculative effort from a 17-year old sub in injury time of the second game.…