Stop moaning on social media and get behind The Arsenal and boss Mikel Arteta 

My heart belongs to the Arsenal. If yours doesn't, then why are you here asks the brilliant Tim Cooper in a must-read piece supporting The Arsenal and Mikel Arteta 

It's hard to be a Gooner these days, writes Tim Cooper. 

Which is weird when we've been the second-best team in the country all season, and still are.

And yet...to look at social media - and wouldn't it be great if we could stop ourselves - you'd think we're about to be relegated. That we've no chance of silverware. The manager needs to be fired. The players need to be sold. The the owners must sell up and go.

And the really weird thing is that those comments are coming from our fellow Gooners.

Even before we lost for the first time in 15 games "Arteta Out!" was trending everywhere from X to BlueSky, Tik Tok to Instagram to Facebook and beyond.

Not to mention every football blog you can name - and every call to TalkS****.

Worst of all, it's contagious.

You hear it so often you start to question your own loyalty.

You start agreeing that we're a club in crisis.

After all, what have we won for the last few years? When did we last win the league? It goes on. Why didn't we buy a striker in July? Or January? Whose fault was it - Arteta? Kroenke Sr? Kroenke Jr? Ayto? Edu? Or some lawyer or accountant whose name we'll never know? Or was it just a perfect storm of bad timing, bad negotiation and bad luck? My money's on the latter and, yes, you can look (and maybe find) someone to blame for some of that.

But finding a scapegoat, and even sacking a scapegoat, still won't find us a striker to maintain and enhance our fading title challenge.

The last two games - thirty shots, three nominally on target, none remotely likely to lead to a goal - have made it harder than ever to keep the faith, to "trust the process."

Watching Leandro Trossard and Ethan Nwaneri hoisting crosses towards... no one, except tall defenders, was just depressing.

Watching Mikel Merino wander about like a lost lamb in search of somewhere the ball might reach him made me feel sorry for the bloke, who never asked to be played in a position he said he thought he might have last played when he was nine years old.

There was a time when Declan Rice would make late surges into the box to get on the end of crosses, just as there were times when Martin Odegaard would drop a shoulder and shoot - and score.

But now Rice seems to have become allergic to entering the penalty area and Odegaard seems to have forgotten he's even allowed to shoot; when he does, you sometimes wish maybe he hadn't bothered after all.

Not to mention the pain of watching Raheem Sterling, a player seemingly devoid of confidence, pace and any last trace of the international goalscorer he was not so long ago; and the confusion of seeing young forwards sitting on the bench as defenders are brought on when we need a goal.

There have been times, and during the Forest game those times lasted from the first minute to the last, that made me wonder whether we were going to score another goal between now and the rest of the season.

Something has gone terribly wrong. Yet, remarkably, we are still second in the league. We have a bit of a gap from the two behind us, and our chasers - Forest and Chelsea - are in erratic form. 

Chelsea fans are angry at their manager too (when are they ever not?) and Forest fans, well they're just grateful to be in the mix at all because you can't win things with 25% possession and a system that's essentially 10-0 when you don't have the ball.

So why are our fans so down on the team?

Why are they so down on the manager who's taken them to their best finishing position in 20 years? Twice in a row. With every chance of doing so again. And who's got them into the last 16 of the Champions League by finishing second in the league stage.

And why are we the whipping boys for every half-baked keyboard warrior, every commentator, every pundit, every sports writer, when we're doing so well?

Why do we get twice the abuse that moneybags Manchester City and the absolute joke that is Manchester United get, not to mention those perennial failures from up the road?

Imagine being a United fan? Imagine being a Sp*rs fan (if you can)? Arteta in particular seems to get grief that no one deserves (except, perhaps, that mumbling miseryguts of an Aussie PE teacher up the road).

All Mikel ever does - all he says - is what he thinks is best for his team and, most of the time, it is. Overall, it's second-best.

Not 16th-best, like those Cockney clowns from West Ham mocking us for being "second again" - something they can only dream about because they've never done it - and crowing about being "champions of Europe" with their Mickey Mouse cup, apparently unaware that we've won two proper European trophies ourselves.

So what's it all about?

Why have we become the Millwall of the Premier League: no one likes us but, you know what, I DO f***ing care.

I remember when neutrals, and even opposition fans in their private moments, loved watching Arsenal - loved the way we played, admired the success we had, envied Wenger with his sophisticated methods and his gallic charm.

Maybe it's just that we live in a terrible age of binary opinion, where you're either great or you're rubbish, even though the vast majority of teams are somewhere in between.

At the current time of writing, only Liverpool are playing "great" and only Leicester and Southampton are convincingly "rubbish."

Everyone else is in between.

But even that can change.Football's always been like that. Ups and downs, victories and defeats (and draws, though these days it has to be a draw that "feels like" a win; or a defeat).

Football always been about hope, and it's nearly always the hope that kills you.

But look at it in perspective: we've got a great young manager who most teams in Europe would snap up the moment he became available, and we've got a great (mostly) young team who most teams in Europe would like to raid for players.

We are also doing far far better than you'd have predicted if you'd known in advance that we would lose our entire forward line - Bukayo Saka, Gabi Martinelli, Kai Havertz and Jesus (scorers of 24 of our 51 league goals) - all at the same time, for half the season, having already coped with our captain and midfield playmaker being out for a long spell before that.

Ask yourself where you think Liverpool would be in the league if they lost Mo Salah, Diogo Jota, Luis Diaz and Cody Gakpo (scorers of 47 of their 66 league goals) all at the same time

Would a frontline led by Nunez, supported by some kids we've never heard of, be in second place?

Of course, you can argue that we ought to have strengthened in January, and we will continue to wonder why we didn't, and you might also argue that we should have sold Jesus long before he suffered another injury that has probably halved his transfer value (and that's being optimistic).

But we didn't.

So we reset and we go again. And everyone who fails to recognise what Havertz brings to the team - as well as his goals - must surely recognise it from what's missing without him, along with those who can't see what Martinelli does, even when he's not at his best (not least when it comes to defending that left-hand side).

And if you're triggered by other fans talking about silverware, just remind yourself that only one team wins the league, and only one team wins a cup, and stop thinking that a season without a trophy is a season of failure.

There will be at least 16 other teams without a trophy at the end of this season and we will probably finish higher than 18.

And finally, remember those words of Dennis Bergkamp: "When you start supporting a club, you don't support it for its trophies, its players or its history. You support it because you find yourself in it, you have found a place where you feel like you belong."

My heart belongs to the Arsenal. If yours doesn't, then why are you here?