The weekend gone and the week ahead.

Morning all.

"I am score goal like Badger"

Well that’s it then, our season has finally started, again, and now it’s about to start in earnest with the games coming thick and fast. From tomorrow night when we face Borussia Dortmund in our opening Champions League group F clash we have six games in a twenty day period that ends with the first NLD of the season.

And when you look at the fixtures we have during that period you have to say it looks like the perfect time for the group to really gel and find it’s feet (Yes that’s what pre season is for but we can’t keep flogging that now dead horse).

Since the win over Swansea on Saturday, our first in the Premier League this season, it seems that there are still many prepared to find something to grumble about and criticise the team. Maybe those people have forgotten that the game came off the back of an international break, our squad, including the late signings, hadn’t trained together for the best part of two weeks until a couple of days before the game. It was our first fixture since Old Trafford, we had two players making their full debuts and another starting only his second Premier League game.

Those aren’t excuses because I don’t feel that excuses need to be made but they are valid points that need to be considered. Many Arsenal sides of recent years would never have ground out a 1-0 win in a game following the kind of devastation inflicted by United – surely that in itself should be taken as a positive? United & City had resounding wins on Saturday but they still received three points just as we did, I’m not going to loose sleep over goal difference at this stage of the season.

The positives garnered from the victory far out weigh any negatives in my opinion. Of course it would be fantastic to sit here this morning and wax lyrical about crushing a newly promoted side six or seven goals to nil but come on we all just wanted to see the team get back to winning ways didn’t we? Well we got that and it’s a foundation to build on.

In other news it seems that there has been some confusion over whether or not Theo Walcott is suspended for tomorrow nights game in Dortmund after the forward received bookings in each of the two qualifying games against Italian side Udinese.

Well there is a simple answer to that question – No. No he isn’t.

Had Theo or any other Arsenal player received a straight red in either of those games then they would be suspended but yellow cards are not carried over so Theo will not be sat up in the stands with Arsene Wenger.

We’ll be looking at the game in more detail tomorrow morning but it was interesting to note that Die Schwarzgelben sufferd a 1-2 home defeat at the hands of Hertha Berlin on Saturday. Hertha Berlin, like Swansea City in the Premier League, are a newly promoted side.

There are a few rumours doing the rounds that Aaron Ramsey picked up a knock against the side from his homeland on Saturday but as yet there is nothing official from the club to collaborate that. I guess we’ll have a much better idea when we discover who is on the plane to Germany later today. For updates on that keep an eye on our Twitter feed.

This evening Dave and I will be attending the Arsenal Supporters Trust meeting and no doubt we’ll both be Tweeting any information of interest and I will of course provide further details in tomorrows post so that’s something for you to look forward to right?

Thanks for reading.

Paul.