Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…

Arsenal didn’t do stupid stuff.

Then, suddenly, something changed.

From winning the Premier League in their back garden to being spanked 8-2, a lot of stupid has occurred along the way.

This post seemed like a good idea when I thought of it, but, really, it’s depressing as hell and, to be honest, it could have easily contained 50 examples of stupidity such as playing Stepanovs, or Denilson being overtaken by the referee as he ‘ran’ back to try and stop Wayne Rooney rampaging up the pitch.

In the end this was all I could do before wanting to smash things.

Grab a stiff drink.

Here we go:

Kieran Gibbs slip

It was 2009 and the Emirates had not experienced an atmosphere like it.

The club had produced thousands of plastic flags but they weren’t needed, not to get the crowd going and not after Kieran Gibbs slipped to allow Ji-Sung Park through on goal.

Hope had lasted eight minutes.

Bringing just a one-goal defeat from the first leg into the home tie, Arsenal were confident that they could do it, that they could dump United out of the Champions League in the semi-final for a place in Rome. It was more than confidence, it was a belief that this was do-able, fuelled by the manager and player’s comments in the run-up to the game.

Conceding on the counter-attack after we took a corner, we fell apart and ended up losing 3-1 on the night, 4-1 on aggregate.

I refused to speak about Arsenal for at least three days after this game, which is especially tricky when you run an Arsenal website.

Setting up van Persie

Robin van Persie’s first match against Arsenal after deciding to try and turn the fans against the club and then sodding off to United couldn’t have went much better for the Dutchman as his good friend, Thomas Vermaelen, all-but set him up for the opener.

He didn’t celebrate that one.

He clearly had no appreciation of how much he was hated at that point.

Losing to a side with seven defenders in it

Manchester United fans still talk about the time Ferguson played seven defenders and still won.

To be fair, we’d probably talk about it too.

If we ever had seven fit defenders at the same time, that is.

Losing 8-2

When we headed to Old Trafford in 2011 we all knew we were in for a bit of a tonking.

We hadn’t reinforced, we were desperately short of players through injury and the main thing we all wanted was to make sure we kept the score respectable.

Ha!

As I covered the match live on Twitter my then-girlfriend thought I was just having a laugh as I stopped tweeting details and just sent numbers corresponding to the number of goals United had scored…five, six, seven, eight.

Eight.

Thinking back, with a backline that contained Djourou, Jenkinson who had only just arrived, and Armand Traore, perhaps we were lucky it was only the eight.

Failing to beat United post-Ferguson

If Arsenal aren’t part of some charity scheme to hep down-trodden teams, then I don’t know what’s up with them.

Right now it feels like we are the only club in the country who haven’t beaten United since Ferguson left.

We probably are.

Time to change that on Monday night.