Q: Why don’t Arsenal score from corners
A: Because Van Persie takes them!

Q: What’s the most popular item in the Arsenal club shop?
A: The Van Persie tea tray, because it carries 10 mugs!

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

Unless you’re of a distinctly Arsenal persuasion, you’re probably sick to the back teeth of these stats by now, but here they are again one more time: 38 goals in 41 games in all competitions since January 1st 2011, 17 goals in 18 appearances since the start of the 2010/11 season (which is somewhere approaching 52% of Arsenal’s goals so far this term) and 10 goals in his last 5 matches.

‘Zeer indrukwekkend’ as the Dutch would have it.

Skip back a month or two to the start of the season and Arsenal were in disarray, supposedly suffering the cataclysmic meltdown that many predicted as a result of their high-profile summer departures combined with Arsene Wenger’s ‘I see no ships’ Admiral Nelson-style transfer policy.

The day they got publicly eviscerated at Old Trafford encapsulated their plight perfectly.

A self-induced loss at Blackburn followed shortly, but a week or so on down the line the Gunner’s experienced a sea change. Whether through coincidence or not, Van Persie hit a scoring seam against Bolton (notching his 100th Premier League goal in the process) at the end of September while Wenger relented and shipped in a platoon of deadline-day replacements and, by and large, everything in the garden has been rosy thereafter.

In fact, they’re almost unbeaten since that very day, save one defeat in the North London derby at the crack of October.

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