She wore a yellow ribbon in the merry month of February 27 January, 2011

So, we’re the famous Arsenal and we’re going to Wembley. Happy Days. The other night against Ipswich was pretty tense but I had feeling we’d get there in the end and so we did. It was a pretty strong side, only Walcott, Nasri and Song we missing from our current preferred XI and I assume we’ll continue our new Carling Cup policy in the final versus Birmingham. Don’t forget to sort out your tickets (details here), Away Scheme members and Gold Members with 3+ away credits have from Monday ’til Wednesday to buy their tickets but if you’re a gold member without credits don’t forget to register your interest before Monday by following that link.

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By the way, anyone who has a season ticket and isn’t planning to go to the game I’d be ever so grateful if I could use your details to get a ticket. Just thought I’d ask on the off chance, drop me an email at lasagnechef [at] the-cannon.com (- [at] + @) if you think you can help, cheers!

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Tickets are proving pretty hard to come by, it’s probably our most popular Carling Cup ever. As everyone keeps reminding us it’s a chance to add to the trophy cabinet for the first time since 2005; and what a chance it is. I went to Cardiff in 2007 and that was a pretty decent day out but back then the Carling Cup was for kids and reserves only. Now some of those youngsters have grown up to become our first team and are looking to right the wrongs of four years ago and lift this trophy, this time at Wembley. It’s our first cup final at the new Wembley too and I don’t care what competition it is – that’s pretty exciting. We had Chelsea in the FA Cup semis there but this is a final now and a cup is just 90 minutes away.

No one is saying that the Carling Cup is enough though. It’ll be nice to get another bit of silverware again if we can do it but it is the least preferred of the four cups and I think the general feeling is that hopefully this triumph could lead us on to greater things. Victory here will hopefully give us the taste of winning and inspire us in the remaining three competitions. Only really Gael Clichy knows what it’s like to win things for Arsenal so it’s time for the rest of the squad to have that same feeling. I’m quite confident we can do it, Birmingham have proved tricky in the past but we’ve shown this season we can beat them and the fact that it’s at Wembley rather than St. Andrews looks good for us too! However this could also go the other way and be totally demoralizing for us; if we were to slip up and lose the final then I think the damage done by that would far exceed the good achieved by winning. To get this far and to have none of the top 6 teams left in the competition and then to not win it would be totally embarrassing, you’d have to say that if we can’t win the Carling Cup in those circumstances then what can we win? Hopefully we don’t have to think about that scenario but it is something that’s in the back of my mind. Anyway, more build up to that one next month, we’ve got a hell of a lot to come before that game.

First up at the weekend we have Huddersfield in the fourth round of the FA Cup. It’s a decent home draw and I think after seeing the team we fielded on Tuesday we might have a slightly less strong team on Sunday, especially with Everton to play on Tuesday night. I hope we’ve learnt our lessons from the first legs’ against Leeds and Ipswich though and don’t go too under strength. To be fair it’s probably more about attitude and application but I’d hate to see us make 8 changes from the team in week and see us struggle again. A bit of rotation is fair enough, Squillaci should come in and give a rest to Djourou or Koscielny, we’ll also probably see Gibbs and Eboue come in on the flanks. Then maybe Song, Nasri and Walcott will be involved after not starting on Tuesday but I think Sunday will be a big chance to Bendtner to build upon his performance against Ipswich and yet another opportunity for Andrey Arshavin to find some form. To be fair to him he did assist two goals on Tuesday but he still doesn’t look himself and he knows it, here’s hoping Sunday can go some way to sorting out his confidence

I should be back for a preview of that game. In fact yes, I promise you I will be! Sorry yet again for the lack of blogging, a number of reasons again for the absence but followers of my twitter will know that it’s been a particularly bad week for my family as my Grandma died just as we kicked off against West Ham. But yes I will try to get back blogging more again, I have been on my twitter a bit more which you can follow at twitter.com/the_cannon. Also on there I’ve set up a list of all the Arsenal players on twitter and you can check that out and follow them for yourself at twitter.com/the_cannon/players. The list includes, Jack Wilshere, Cesc Fabregas, Johan Djourou, Bacary Sagna, Robin van Persie and more. I’m personally loving hearing about what the Arsenal players are up to and for the first time in a long time I feel some sort of connection with the players. It’s great to see the banter between them and the evidence of a strong team spirit there, it’s great.

You know what’s also great? This whole Richard Keys and Andy Grey saga recently. I’m so glad they’ve both left and I think it’s hilarious they’ve been embarrassed like this on the way. To be honest it wasn’t the whole sexist thing that wanted me rid of them, their views are terribly outdated and bias and it’s about time the Sky Sports panel got freshened up, they’re both cocks and not because they clearly despise Arsenal. I don’t know who they’re going to replace them with but I quite like Jeff Stelling and it’d be good to see a bit more of him. It’s just a shame Keys couldn’t drag Jamie Redknapp down with him, nevermind.

Right so I’ll speak to you soon building up to the Huddersfield game. See ya.

What? Transfer window? What do you mean? No, never heard of it, sorry.