Wednesday cannon fodder: Thank you

Hi there! Today’s gonna be kind of an open thread, a departure from the usual link dump, because I have something I want to say. Over the last few years, as Arsenal have Groundhog Day-d their way through seasons, we’ve all lost a bit of the appetite for closely following the team. There’s not much original to say about a team with the same shortcomings every season who addresses them (or doesn’t) in largely the same ways every season, after all, and that’s both a challenge for us as writers and a pretty large de-motivator for you as active commenters, because after a while “this team isn’t what it should be” becomes less and less easy to say in a unique way.

But!

There’s a reasonable amount of optimism bubbling around the team now - not necessarily for this month, or the rest of this season, but that the giant ocean liner that is Arsenal seems to be steering away from the iceberg marked WELCOME TO BEING EVERTON (no offense, Everton fans), and, if things this summer go as well as they did in January, back towards the Top Four Dock in a season or so.

And that guarded optimism is showing, even in our silly little corner of the internet. January was the best month that The Short Fuse Dot Com has ever had, in terms of traffic - over 400,000 of you came by to see what we were up to. To put that in perspective, that’s about four times what traffic was in December, and about twice what it is in most months.

So on behalf of all the writers here, I want to thank you - thank you for sticking with us during some very frustrating times, thank you for joining in the conversation, and thank you for reading. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we love that you’ve made TSF a stop on your regular Arsenal rounds. We’ll keep writing if you keep showing up. Sound like a plan?

And now, it’s Open Thread Time! What do you want to talk about?