Since a week ago, Arsenal have managed to continue this season's 100% record in Europe, and notched up what in years gone by would have been the perfect scoreline – a one-nil home win – to restore some pride in League terms, and all this while acquiring a new record goalscorer for the club. As each of these events unfolded, it gave me cause for good cheer, not least when I viewed the panache and skill with which Thierry's first goal in an ironically depleted Prague stadium saw him draw level with Ian Wright.
While watching these two exchanging a hug and a commemorative trophy in the centre circle before the game, a feeling of optimism remained, was briefly bolstered by the first, efficiently dispatched penalty, managed to hang on despite the farce of the second and a questionably disallowed Man City equaliser and went marching off for the sleep of the truly righteous overnight. Today, freshly showered, the optimism stumbled in a daze through the early kickoffs, and saw table-topping Chelsea drop their first points of the campaign to the team at the foot of the table, one time Champions League qualifiers Everton (chuckling as it went at how Jose Mourinho had a clearcut view of the victory-robbing offside flag that he thought shouldn't have been raised but not the Terry handball that most everyone else within Goodison bar the ref had shouted for). It even survived Andy Gray's post-match comparison of the Beattie penalty strike with the Pires one from the previous day (the second one, that is).
But optimism faltered and fell away when later on this evening the first “episode” of Football Icon came on Sky. This latest mutation of the Pop Idol/X-Factor competition format has morphed across into the world of football, and I can't help but think that this is the equivalent of the bird flu virus becoming transmissible between humans in aerosol form.
In case you missed it, the concept is very much a la Will, Michelle or Steve (ok, maybe not Michelle) overcoming competition to arrive – via the TV company and Ray Wilkins' judgement – at a guaranteed professional contract with a Premiership club. “Which one?”, you may ask, foolish reader, before realising that of course only one club can afford to guarantee contracts and wages to a squad in total disregard of whether they'll ever be employed to play a match – yup, you're spot on; it's Chelsea, and what this means for everyone else in the division, whose merest hint of interest in any really effective player produces a blocking spoiler bid from them, let alone any aspiring footballer seeking to get on someone, anyone's books by the conventional route... well, let's just say it's not good news so far as I can see.
At the same time, Roman Abramovic's presumably ghost-written foreword to the new history of Chelsea speaks of wanting to establish a dynasty for the next hundred years (shades of the Nuremburg Reichschancellery, anyone?), and the great man's yacht (tastefully named Ecstasea) is splashed all over photo features in the Sunday papers, though they haven't managed to include a snap of the rumoured escape sub built into it.
So in the end, despite the week's results having gone pretty much as I would have hoped at it's outset, rather than harbouring a much travelled sense of optimism, I'm left feeling a bit bemused and confused at the end of it, much like Rio Ferdinand must have felt when he turned up to an empty Man U training ground in midweek, having forgotten that it was the team's day off. Muppet.