Arsenal ensured their 125th birthday celebrations were marked with a victory when defeating Everton 1-0 at Emirates Stadium in the Premier League thanks to a goal of outstanding beauty from Robin van Persie.

Just a day after the club unveiled statues of Herbert Chapman, Tony Adams and Thierry Henry outside their ground, Van Persie demonstrated why he may one day attain legendary status of his own in Islington with his 15th and best league goal of a wonderful season.

Arsenal ensured their 125th birthday celebrations were marked with a victory when defeating Everton 1-0 at Emirates Stadium in the Premier League thanks to a goal of outstanding beauty from Robin van Persie.

Just a day after the club unveiled statues of Herbert Chapman, Tony Adams and Thierry Henry outside their ground, Van Persie demonstrated why he may one day attain legendary status of his own in Islington with his 15th and best league goal of a wonderful season.

Written by MickyDidIt89

Shrouded in a cloak of despondency as I was yesterday, to say nothing of a virus that will almost certainly condemn me to time in intensive care, I retired to bed last night with several bottles of stimulants lapping within, only to awake this morning with the thought that the only way forward was to adopt a siege mentality.

In my youth Highbury was a less than salubrious place (sorry to those who grew up there!). Coming from a leafier part of North London the journey on the 210 bus seemed like entering a foreign land. How things have changed. Today the squares of Highbury and Islington are seriously des. res.. Sadly but unsurprisingly the reverse has happened to Tottenham which has been directly reflected in the success of our football teams.

Ok this is my nightmare, Arsenal fail to make the Champions League and lose £25 million revenue and drop into the Europa League, then to put it bluntly our chances of staying in the top four are made increasingly worse, as the high quality players who would have come to Arsenal with the lure of Champions League Football will look elsewhere.

TGIF: nearly but so far

OK this is a teaser for the return of TGIF, I have to say that the old format was not very interactive and it was more you readers being fed , then expressing your views via the comments. So the new TGIF will become more interactive with the best comments in the first two hours being responded to and included with the Blog for posterity.

Tim Payton grew up in Islington and went to Highbury Grove School, and has been going to watch...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

A few tweets from Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, summed up my misgivings about the events which have occurred in the past 48 hours:
I am in shock over Kroenke taking 62% of Arsenal. Heart not head. Doesn't feel in keeping with Gooner traditions, tho am not sure why.
What may be lost at Arsenal with Kroenke takeover is our distinctiveness & proud sense of independence.

OK, a couple of years back I made a fleeting appearance in the Camden & Islington Journal about the death of an Arsenal terrace legend but this time I've made it on to a national broadsheet with an article about Lee Hendrie arriving in Indonesia to play in the Liga Primer Indonesia!
A few weeks back The Independent asked me to pen something about Lee's arrival in Indonesia with Bandung following on from my interview with him on Jakarta Casual TV and of course I was happy to do something so here it is!