The Daily Links: The Let's Get It (Re-)Started Edition

Well that was a good weekend of football all round. After another interminable international break, the Premier League returned to action with a bang; there were high-scoring derbies, questionable refereeing decisions, dropped points by big clubs, and a thrashing for a so-called title contender.

Arsenal's goalscorer, Olivier Giroud
(Photo courtesy Ronnie Macdonald)

Arsenal will be happy to have bounced back from their defeat to Manchester United two weeks ago with a solid 2-0 home victory against this season's surprise package, Southampton. While it was never a classic, Arsenal will be happy with the result and the fact that, despite pressure from the Saints after Olivier Giroud's first goal, they kept a clean sheet and did enough at the other end to earn a late penalty, which Giroud coolly converted to calm nerves at the Emirates. If you haven't already seen the Handsome One's first goal, it's well worth a watch, just to see Artur Boruc's Johan Cruyff impression. If that goal felt a bit fortunate, it was fully deserved after the Club had earlier hit the post twice via sublime efforts from Jack Wilshere and Aaron Ramsey. The match was also notable for the return from injury of Theo Walcott, who looked sharp and came close to scoring in his 20-minute run out.

The Token Englishman: Why do all my countrymen underrate Jack Wilshere?

I've been asked once to try and come up with a British point of view for this blog, and ever since, I've been racking my brains for something to write. The aim is for this to become an (irregular) series of posts whenever I have a particularly English point of view.

Wilshere - Underrated for England?
(Photo courtesy - dom fellowes)

As a Brit raised in a household without Sky Sports (shocker, right?!), my main source of football news and commentary has always been the BBC. If any of you have ever followed a BBC live text commentary, you will know that they allow people to interact via text and Twitter. Every time I've logged on to BBC this season and followed their text commentaries, there are always a number of tweets saying that Jack Wilshere shouldn't be in the squad and that he's "out of form".

The WAT: Correspondent wakes up disoriented, naked, reads about League Cup exit

Sources confirm that "weekly" The Weekly Arsenal Thing columnist, Alex Johnson, woke early Friday morning, stark naked, sweating, and completely disoriented.

COYG
(photo credit: ctmarie3)

"Jesus, it's November?", croaked the barely audible and now clinically dehydrated and malnourished Johnson, gleaning the dateline from the top of a stack of unread newspapers, which had accumulated under the front door mail slot.

"Oh, the Red Sox won the World Series. That's cool," Johnson reportedly said, before rushing out to make sure his black, 2011 Honda Civic, with moon-roof, remained unmolested where he had last parked it. "Phew," Johnson released in a follow-up statement. "The old girl looks all right."

"Shit!" Johnson announced to the press after thumbing awkwardly through the Sports section, overshooting, then returning to and checking page D6 for soccer scores, "We're out of the League Cup!", before issuing a follow-up verbal statement: "Whatever, it's the League Cup, I guess. Sucks that it was Chelsea, though. Was the game even on TV?"