As a Gooner of 27 years and the presenter of this fanzine’s podcast, I think the results of this survey are crucial every year. Sure, a few of my friends and my whole family are Gooners, but to find out what each and every one of us thinks is the most important thing. Close to 3,000 people have responded to this and we thank each and every one of you for taking the time to fill it in – hopefully the results will be an incredibly interesting read for you all.

To kick us off (STANDARD FOOTBALL PUN!), we’re starting with the top of the bill Oscars and Golden Raspberries of the 2013/14 season focusing on the team itself. Based on the votes of nearly 3,000 people, our Player of the Season this time around is Aaron Ramsey and that makes me happier than anything. As soon as we signed him I picked out a young guy who was going to be an important player for this Club, and even though the poor man was shawcrossed, took a long time to get back to fitness, and was booed and jeered for most of the immediately preceding season, the Ramsey we originally bought was BACK. He took 69.6% of the votes in this year’s vote and is the fulcrum of our midfield that scored and created delicious goals throughout the season. If it wasn’t for Arsenal’s medical team AGAIN fudging up a player’s recovery from a minor injury and we had him for those three months he missed, we may have maintained our Title challenge. But for Rambo to get our Player of the Season award even though he missed such a long spell proves how good he was.

In second place, we have an arm wrestle between two players and in fairness it should probably be a joint award between the two of them –Per Mertesacker and Laurent Koscielny (the BFG nudging LK6 into second place by 23 votes). Despite several truly woeful team performances in big games (more on that later) our defence has looked far, far better this season and the duo themselves are the best and most efficient duo we’ve had since Tony Adams and Steve Bould. They hug and high five at the end of the every game and the fact they both made it to the World Cup quarter finals for their respective countries is not a coincidence. They’re keeping the Club captain out of the team at the moment and it may force him out which would be the first time our skipper leaving wouldn’t upset us… having said that, Tommy V was the clear winner of last year’s Most Disappointing Player by a country mile!

This year saw a selection of different nominations for Most Disappointing Player aside from the six put forward in the list of suggestions. These new ones included one person suggesting Ramsey, eight people who must have been upset with the way Emiliano Viviano put the cones out in training, and others that were infuriated by Kim Kallstrom failing to win the League singlehandedly in his four month contract (one month of which was spent in the treatment room). The results as a whole saw Nacho Monreal (28%) and Yaya Sanogo (17%) finish first and second respectively. Whilst the freedom of speech allows people to voice their opinion and is a priceless thing I am a little confused as to how our fans were more disappointed by a reserve left back and an unknown young striker signed on a free transfer than they were our €50m record signing who blatantly couldn’t be bothered a lot of the time (only 9% of the vote in total for Ozil). And they’re not Andre Santos and Ju-Young Park either! For me, a reserve left back is what it is. Remember your school team’s reserve left back? Exactly. As for Sanogo… well for him, in the words of Yazz and her Plastic Population, the only way is up (baby). I can only think the annoyance towards him is an implicit disappointment in Wenger’s failure to use the £160m in our Club’s current account to purchase one of the two experienced international forwards we went after.

With Arsenal’s medical team perennially giving players with a broken fingernail a long term injuries a pertinent questions was as to who the player we missed most when out injured was. As mentioned earlier, Ramsey’s mysterious three months or so on the touchline led to the season being soundtracked by the song ’What Might Have Been’ and 67% of voters thought so too. In second place, 31% felt that Theo Walcott’s ACL injury was the biggest problem and with there being no other element of pace throughout the squad and us being slower than Andy Carroll on Mogadon without him, I see exactly where they’re coming from. Personally, I’m incredibly fearful that this injury and our medical team rob of him of his speed and my fingers, toes, and eyes are crossed that he comes back 100% fit.

For the first time in at least a couple of years the question Arsenal’s Best Team Performance? has more genuine answers than ‘Beating Spurs 5-2 at home’ as from time to time we looked like Title winners, and some pundits even went so far as to suggest that Arsenal were the best team in the Premier League throughout the year 2013. Votes here went to many different games but 36% were mesmerised by our clinical, efficient, and outstanding 2-0 defeat of Napoli at home. That night we were Bayern Munchen-esque with two glorious early goals shutting the game off (Ozil’s opener was so fluid I thought he arrived to make his finish on a surfboard), and us then defending so rigidly, the BFG looked like Ian McKellen in ‘Lord of the Rings’ bellowing “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”. It was one of those few games when afterwards you’re walking away from the ground thinking “Christ, we can win this competition”, and for us to beat a team fielding Higuain (so shortly after we failed to sign him) alongside Reina, Hamsik Behrami, and Inler so easily was tremendous. Similarly, the 2-0 home win against Liverpool was deserving of the 25% it received as we never looked threatened by a very good side, and the win was sealed an absolute Roy Race belter, this time from Rambo. A popular alternative answer to those on the nominations list given by other people was the FA Cup Final itself. Now, whilst some of you may look at the performance itself being questionable as we were 0-2 down to a Rugby League team town’s Sunday League soccer side and needed extra time to scrape a 3-2 win, the bottom line is that at the end of it all we lifted a proper Trophy. And that is a game we will always remember.

Sadly, based on how our season was, the bastard step-son of ‘tremendous performance in big games’ is unbelievably woeful performance in a must-win game. And that step-son had several brothers all over the country in Liverpool, Manchester, and loads of other places. 70% of you agree that the 6-0 hammering at Stamford Bridge was the worst of the worst. A score and performance so bad the Brazil team allegedly watched it after their World Cup semi-final to calm down and feel better, and is something we will all try to erase from our minds as soon as we possibly can. 1-0 down after five minutes, 2-0 two minutes later, 4-0 by half-time… and of course there was more to come. In Wenger’s 1000th game in charge of our beloved Club. Humiliation doesn’t begin to describe that afternoon from any Arsenal angle.

Anyway – enough of that and let’s focus on the good stuff again! We scored 99 goals in all competitions last season so choosing your top 3 favourite goals would take ages for anyone to answer. But as when you ask anyone to choose their favourite child and they reply that there are so many things to consider, the answer will come into their head straight away (says a man whose mother introduced her sons as “Tony and Tony’s Brother” twice when he was growing up). 70% of us agree that Wilshere’s goal against Norwich that would have had Barcelona fans salivating was our best of the season and you can’t really argue. It was close to a perfect, one-touch, tiki-taka goal where the goalkeeper Ruddy didn’t move and the defenders hadn’t started to even contemplate playing the offside trap on Wilshere and Giroud by the time the ball hit the back of the net. When you see a replay of a goal going in on the big screens at the game and it makes the 60,000 people go “AWWWWWWW” as though they’ve just seen Ross and Rachel kiss on an episode of ‘Friends’, you actually feel blessed as a footy fan. In second place was Rosicky’s opening minute top corner drive against Spurs at their place which finished the game off just after it had started, and in third place it was the goal that saw the perfect end to our season. Ramsey’s winning goal in the FA Cup Final was a cute and deft outside of the boot finish in off the post and was our player of the season winning the trophy for us. Despite being a fan of all of his work, I don’t think that Nick Hornby could have written the script as perfect as that.

To finish off this section are a couple of questions summarising the season as a whole. Firstly was whether you at any point thought that Arsenal could challenge for the Premier League title, and the responses were a lot closer than the title race itself turned out to be, sadly. 56% of us did at one point or another think that we had a chance whilst 44% felt we didn’t. Personally, I was in the slight minority here expecting that our relative inactivity in the transfer windows coupled with our medical team would shoot us in the foot, and I hate being proved right here. The second question was a more relevant one, though, in asking whether the season as a whole was a success or not and 86% of us think that it was. When you think about it, if after the opening game of the season someone offered you a now-typical 4th place finish and Arsenal winning the FA Cup then I’m sure we all would have snatched their arm off. Sure, at the turn of the year we may have been expecting a lot more, but the memories I have of seeing the Cup Final at Wembley, my family party after the game, the Sunday afternoon parade with tens of thousands of us celebrating with the players themselves, remind me of why I am who I am, proud to be a Gooner, and proud of my Club and my players and looking forward to the new season.

That covers the team-focused questions in the first part of the survey. The next part will feature questions on other clubs’ seasons, the state of the squad itself at the moment, what could happen in the transfer window, and the management side of the team.

Twitter@DavidOudot

Ed’s note - We will be running the remainder of the results pieces over the course of next week, and provide a downloadable pdf of the full survey results with the final part.