With the kind of speed that would embarrass a snail in lead boots, I bring you the news that Thierry Henry has decided to stay at Arsenal.

It’s a fantastic fillip, obviously, and on so many levels – and rather cleverly, it leaves the ball in Arsenal’s court to come up with a suitably generous and lengthy deal.

I think it’s safe to assume he was given some assurances too, about squad strengthening, so January might be more interesting than we thought.

Hopefully, we can tie down Cole to a longer contract too, and build from that. Forget the tapping up nonsense for a second – on a purely footballing level, if we let Cole go, we are disposing of one of the best players in his position in Europe. That would be just plain silly.

As for yesterday, well we did all we needed, but not much more. That’s why it got a bit tense towards the end, but with such inexperience in the ranks, perhaps that was inevitable. Pick of the young’uns coming in for me was Kerrea Gilbert, who was amazingly composed at right-back. With Eboue off to Africa, does Wenger have him in mind for the right-back position, with Lauren going left, until Cole is back at the beginning of February? On yesterday’s performance, we could do worse. Anyway, in a polyglot team made up of multinational talent, it’s nice to see an Englishman being given a chance, and, better still, taking it.

Djourou, too, deserves a mention and in some ways he was the more composed half of our all Swiss central defence. He’s very tall too. Not that that’s a pre-requisite, just an observation.

Elder thus-far-underperforming statesman Pires also had a good game, doubling his season’s tally with two neat goals. We needed that, and I’d like to think he did too. Though he might beg to differ.

So onto Saturday, and I’m off to the Emirates Grove reservation centre to pick my new seat. All the people I know who have already been through the process have warned me that it’s really quite underwhelming.

Have a good week. I’ve got to go back to work for the first time in what feels like an age, and suffice to say, I’ve got the Sunday blues.

Working’s rubbish, it is.