Arsenal 1-0 Newcastle: The Last Good, The Final Bad, And The Ultimate Ugly

Full disclosure: I missed all of Sunday's action. I was in Vancouver with the lovely mrs. pdb and some of my fellow Eleventy Ones to watch the Portland Timbers take on the Vancouver Whitecaps (and leave with a point that if I'm honest, they probably didn't deserve, but that's a whole 'nother post). Because international data roaming is stupid expensive, and because I didn't turn my phone on until we got to the border crossing at Blaine, and because our bus left BC at 9AM (pro tip, kids: if you know you're going to be out late, don't plan on catching a 9AM bus the next morning because blarghoighrrrrrrrrughblggggh), I had no idea what was going on over in England.

We got to the border, my friend turned on his phone and checked Twitter, and he looked at me and said "do you want to know?" so I said sure, as my phone was still powering up. He showed me a tweet of Theo saying "I'd like to say it's a shame (that Spurs didn't make the CL), but it's not really", and all of a sudden, my sleep-deprived, sorta-hung-over, wanna-be-home-on-my-couch-now self was very, very happy.

I got home, watched some highlights, and consulted with the other oracles of TSF, and I now bring you the season's final Good, Bad, Ugly. To the GBUifier!

THE GOOD:
Really? You need me to spell it out? OK. Arsenal have now qualified for the Champions League for 16 consecutive years. SIXTEEN YEARS. For those of you who think that this is the ceiling of Arsenal's ambition, you're wrong - it's just that Arsenal's start this season and wobbly fall/early winter left them with far too big of a hill to climb to hope for a championship, and given those wobbles, Arsenal left themselves with some work to do to qualify for the CL. They did that work, finishing the season with a 10 match unbeaten run (hey! That's the same as the Timbers' unbeaten run right now! TIMBERS FOR EUROPE!), and they got results when they needed them, even if they weren't pretty.

Arsenal's resource constraints are well known, but as someone mentioned in the comments yesterday, this feels like Arsenal have made it through to the other side - starting next season, the money spigot is much more fully open, so while I'm not going to sit here and say ARSENAL WILL BUY ALL THE PLAYERS I have a sneaking feeling this off season will be very, very different than the last few. And with CL football guaranteed again (assuming Arsenal win their qualifying round), I'm pretty damn optimistic heading into the summer.

Also, St. Totteringham's Day. The best holiday of the year, the day when the rightful order of things is cemented for yet another year.

THE BAD:
The only bad I can think of is that Arsenal didn't score six, but then I wasn't expecting them to, so.

THE UGLY:
There was only Theo's thwack off the post, and even that wasn't so much "ugly" as "unlucky", but WHO GIVES A DAMN ARSENAL ARE IN THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE AND SPURS ARE NOT AND ARSENAL ARE WHICH IS AWESOME BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA SPURS

So there you have it, the last GBU of the season. I feel like over the summer I'll need to GBU my workmates, or the traffic or the weather or something, because I like doing this and I'll miss it until games start again.