It's the hope that gets you as Champions League looms

Here's the Gooner Fanzine's brilliant Henry Waddon on the highs and lows of supporting Mikel Arteta's Arsenal  

This stupid, stupid, silly, stupid sport, man.

This stupid sport that dictates our mood for weeks at a time; this ridiculous invention that governs our schedule, gives us meaning and takes us to such intense highs and to such crushing lows.

If last Wednesday felt like one of those incredible, reaffirming, unique highs, then Saturday felt like a cruel, vindictive low.

This article will not be vitriolic. It won’t point fingers, it won’t desperately grasp at European striker-shaped straws, it won’t demand that players be dropped, or sold, or chastised. It won’t buy into clickbait narratives, nor will it try to generate them. It will just do its best to live in the acknowledgement of this horrible, gut-punch feeling that’s sat in my stomach since around 715pm on Saturday evening.

A feeling that many of you may already have experienced, and moved through, and made your peace with. The feeling that… maybe…say it quietly… this just isn’t supposed to be our year

With Arsenal Football Club, it truly is the hope that kills you. And it feels as though I’ve died a hundred graphic deaths at Mr Hope’s hands this season.

With every Liverpool slip-up, with the explosion of two Hale End wonderkids, and with the beginnings of what looked like a decent cup run, Hope has gripped me up against the wall, dragged me down the famous Years Steps, beaten me black and blue and left me lying there looking up at the North London sky.

I lie there thinking of May 19, 2024, and wishing so desperately that things might have gone just the tiniest bit differently.

Because despite the noise online, despite what the usual suspects on The Overlap might say, and despite the rhetoric that is relentlessly forced upon us, we, as Arsenal fans, know that this team has more than earned any success that comes its way.

Across the last two-to-three years, we have been the most-consistently exceptional club in the country, we’ve built the best defence the league has seen in many years, and we’ve smashed records that were established by storied, historic Arsenal sides.

The very thought - the very contemplation - that this team, who has brought us so many unrepeatable moments and memories, may not win the trophies that they’ve so richly merited… is quite genuinely heartbreaking.

It is a horrible, horrible, horrible prospect.

One that makes you consider all the time and emotional energy you’ve directed towards this project and this era.

It hurts, and it must cut even more deeply for this able, determined, generational squad.

What hurts even more is that so much of this season has felt like some sort of bizarre simulation. Unprecedented sending-offs, unfathomable misses, and an injury list that would have sunk lesser teams to the borders of Conference League irrelevance.

Whatever contract we signed with the devil in regards to the relative fortune of the previous two seasons has well and truly expired.

In truth, in a statement that would send Arsenal Twitter into a rage that would be extreme even by their standards, Mikel Arteta deserves credit for coaching this barebone squad to second place in the League, and to third place in the European standings.

But if the fixture congestion is (pardon-the-pun) hamstringing us in the injury department, it is also handing us a bi-weekly opportunity to bury the hatchet, summon whatever tiny reserves of energy this team has left, and go again.

Europe remains our Everest, and tonight represents an enormous chance to consolidate a vital position in the competition’s topeight.

A must-win, cup-final of a tie (adjectives that could, unfortunately, be applied to every single game we play in our quest to lift the silverware we all dream of).

All I know with certainty is that this manager, this crop of players, and this daft, ridiculous, embarrassing, beautiful, brilliant, awful, perfect football club has my time, my attention and the uncontrollable corner of my emotional psyche that draws us into this loving this stupid, stupid, silly, stupid sport until it gives me any reason to turn my back on it.

It has my hope, too, and may it kill me over and over and over again for the rest of my life.

Until it’s mathematically impossible. Until the end.