Three Things We Learned from Arsenal v Fulham - by Alan Alger

The Emirates crowd is the best it has been

Barring some one-off matches (Barcelona, Leicester) and North London Derbies, the Ashburton bowl has sometimes struggled to provide a consistent atmosphere. Talk of a library is as far fetched as the accusations that were levelled at the Highbury crowd, yet we all know that in the last decade or so we’ve had some quiet afternoons and evenings at the place. Something has changed though! Our travelling support has always been excellent, but there’s now been a real shift in support at home matches. It started midway through last season and hopefully has now become the norm.

The support in the Clock End has been outstanding and it’s great to see young lads recreating the kind of songs and joy I was happy enough to be a part of just a quarter of a mile east on the terraces in the late 80s early 90s. The club are definitely on to something if they keep the costs down in that area of the stadium, the benefits are huge, because that mood is seeping into areas you wouldn’t even believe would be up on their feet singing.

In Club Level before the game yesterday there were people up singing at the tops of their voices. In the Upper Tiers too. The best thing about this collective mood is that even during frustrating spells on the pitch the whole crowd is behind the team and willing them on. Take the frustrating spell at 1-1 against the Cottagers when it looked as though we wouldn’t go ahead and have to settle for a point, the crowd kept supportive and got their reward.

Bukayo Saka Needs A Rest

It’s a testament to Bukayo Saka’s character that he had a poor game yesterday but still managed to thread a pass to Odegaard for the equaliser, it was possibly the only important ball he played that found a red shirt. He was unfortunately miles off the player we know he is, and it’s not his fault.

We have a multitude of fitness and conditioning staff at London Colney, as we saw in All Or Nothing, surely one of them must be advocating a nice break for our England-winger? Nobody can sustain the amount of matches he’s played in the last 30 months at such a young age, and even if those fitness tests are producing green lights for Mikel Arteta to continue picking him, soon his form won’t.

He was making his 101st Premier League appearance for the club, and he turns 21 next Monday. Arteta needs to be ruthless and pull him out of the England squad and give him a break ahead of that. Southgate knows exactly what he can offer and would surely agree he can only be seen at his best in Qatar with a fresh mind and body. It would be an absolute travesty to run him into the ground and break him before we see his full potential.

Take The Positives

Apart from the odd team which get cut adrift each season (hello Bournemouth), there are no easy games in the Premier League these days. Look at Manchester City going 2-0 down to Crystal Palace yesterday. Sometimes you have to fight back and show character and we did that yesterday. Particularly the individual redemption of Gabriel finding the winner.

The adversity of losing Zinchenko and Partey from a settled line-up that has produced three straight wins was always going to knock our stride early in this London Derby. Looking back on the highlights we did need a couple of superb Ramsdale saves to stay in with a chance of scooping all three points, but overall certainly deserved the win. We did have a creeping tendency to overplay things yesterday and made some panicked and bad decisions at 1-1 when there were better balls on which would have found players in better scoring positions. Yet all that said we prevailed.

This era of the Premier League is much harder to achieve top four than when we went on our incredible run of 20 straight seasons in the upper quartet!