Eye on Stamford

As important as taking care of your own results is, Arsène Wenger and the Arsenal team will, for the rest of this season have one eye on Stamford Bridge, as results there will be almost more important than results at the Emirates.

With every interview I see with our manager there is one question that you can almost guarantee will be asked, now that you've played all of the top four, do you think you're in with a good chance at the title? The honest answer to that is of course, but not to incur complacency he will, like the post Sunderland match, say no game is easy but we will fight till the end.

The truth is, Chelsea's results are almost more important than our own till the end of the season. It doesn't matter if we win every game left this season, we could win each game by five goals it wouldn't matter if Chelsea didn't drop points. However this weekend has been a perfect example of how the rest of the footballing year will go, teams like Everton, Tottenham, Man City and Villa will consistently take points off the title chasing sides.

So if you were to ask Arsène the same run in question but off the record, you could bet he will be fancying his chances because you take those four teams I mentioned and add in Liverpool and Manchester United, we only face two of those six sides (Man City and Spurs) Chelsea have to face five of them. (Man City, Spurs, Villa, Man Utd and Liverpool)

So it's clear that Chelsea's results will be almost as interesting as ours for the rest of this season. Not to get carried away, but if you mark those five main Chelsea fixtures as draws and do the same with Arsenal's two big games that makes our points tallies exactly the same, another bad result or two for Chelsea and all of a sudden things look very good for Arsenal.

I realise I'm probably simplifying things a bit because we all know, especially this season, results can go awry and games you expect to win can go horribly wrong and then your written off as title contenders. And it's always risky to look ahead and try and predict who will win what and who won't but it's not surprising that people, even pundits, are realising that we're in a good position looking at the fixture list, even the likes of Mark Lawrenson on Match of the Day Saturday night had a sneaky feeling for us!

No matter what pundits and I might be saying and writing, Arsène took the right course of action in saying that every game in the Premiership is a difficult game and urging his side to fight till the end. We're still long shots for the title but the more and more you look at the remaining fixtures the more and more you think that stranger things have happened.

Of course the next game away to Stoke is a potential banana skin and everything I've just written could be thrown out the window, but you get the impression this season that this side will fairly easily beat the 'lesser' sides and has that kind of fight that will definitely be tested at places like Stoke. I also get the impression that next weekend could be another turning point in the title race, we go to Stoke and Chelsea play Man City after playing in Milan and meeting José Mourinho once again during the week. Dare I think the table could look even better this time next week?

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