Arsenal 5-1 Bournemouth: TONK!

Full disclosure: I only half-watched this game between meetings at work, so this won’t be the most tactically nuanced or insightful recap ever. You know what it will be, though? Happy!

I mean.

How long has it been since Arsenal straight up tonked a team in the Premier League? How long since they put a serious hurting on someone? October 7, 2018, against Fulham, is how long. Both of those 5-1 wins are Arsenal’s widest-margin wins of the season, and this latest one came at a perfect time - Spurs are in the midst of their annual Spursing, to which Arsenal will hopefully contribute this weekend, and these three points keep Arsenal ahead of Manchester United, if only by a point. But still.

The better part, though, is that the goal-scoring love was spread around quite a bit. Mesut Özil got things started in the fourth minute, followed by Henrikh Mkhitaryan a half hour later. And on and on it went, Arsenal scoring more or less at will, until Alexandre Lacazette’s stunning free kick wrapped up the scoring with 11 minutes to go in the game.

The only down note was when Laurent Koscielny got stepped on, but he seems OK, so panic averted there I guess.

This is where many Arsenal fans will start saying BUT IT’S ONLY BOURNEMOUTH, to which I say, who hurt you? I don’t care what else is going on in the broader picture, if you can’t enjoy a comfortable win - even over an opponent a team like Arsenal is supposed to beat comfortably - it might be time to take a beat and realize that winning is actually fun, and that winning a game should make you happy.

There’s plenty of time to discuss what’s going not so well overall. Let’s go wild, take a day and celebrate what went right. What was your favorite moment of the game?