Arsenal 5-0 Aston Villa: 5 5 5

In previous years, this sort of fixture - an Arsenal on the upswing playing at home against a previously struggling, relegation-threatened team - was a huge banana skin for Arsenal; no matter how well they were playing against the West Broms, Burnleys, etc of the world, they could always manage to snatch mediocrity out of the jaws of certain victory, leaving fans and other observers wondering how such a theoretically good team could be so pedestrian.

This, fans, is not previous years.

Aston Villa, who haven't scored since the Thatcher administration, came to London, where they've seen reasonable success against Arsenal, and promptly gave Arsenal their lunch money, wedgied themselves, and in a nice touch, stuffed themselves into a locker before telling Arsenal it was OK if he dated their sister and giving Arsenal an extra £25 to take her out on the town.

Usually in a loss this lopsided, I try to look for something positive to say about the losing team - there's typically at least one thing that you can say "well, at least they did THAT well". But Villa? They're quite bad. I mean, like I don't know how they're not in 20th place bad.

Arsenal had this game settled in the 8th minute, when an unbelievably awesome first touch from Özil found the feet of an Olivier Giroud who had so much room, he almost screwed up the chance out of disbelief before slotting the ball past Brad Guzan.

Özil would get on the scoresheet himself in the 56th minute when Giroud returned the favor and laid on a gorgeous ball for Özil to run on to and bury in the far corner.  Further goals from Theo Walcott (his first in over a year), a Cazorla penalty thanks to Guzan bringing down Chuba Akpom and Cazorla slotting home the resulting penalty kick. An injury time goal from Hector Bellerin closed the books on a wonderful day for Arsenal, and a significantly less wonderful day for those fans who came down from Birmingham for the day.