ON THIS OF ALL WEEKENDS, ARSENAL fans armed with advance knowledge of the figures would have lost no sleep. Those of us who have been around this club a while recognise the critical difference between statistics and stature. Statistics are freely available and widely distorted. Stature is a reputation granted to few. Around the football world, the very name “Arsenal” stands for style and statesmanship, for a certain way of doing things. It stands for respect.

So our results at the top level of league football mean we lie third in this new table? We can cope with that, especially in a week when an exhilarating decade is capped by an enviable new home. There were two elements to the pride felt by most of us who sat for the first time in the “new Highbury” on Saturday (with apologies to Emirates, we will surely soon revert to location rather than sponsor). One was deeply historic, the other joyfully contemporary.

Home had been just around the corner, the other side of the Tube station previously known as Gillespie Road, for far longer than any of us had been around to see. Almost a century at Highbury, with its marble halls, its manicured pitch and its memories unlimited. The leaving was painful, but this stadium, with its elegant contours, was like a new, head-over-heels love affair. Not least, of course, because we know that we will not have to amuse ourselves admiring the architecture when the football gets tedious. With the modern Arsenal, that does not happen. The modern Arsenal play football to die for, at least most of the time.

I started going to Highbury in the late 1960s. My dad was born and raised a stone’s throw from the ground and it always felt like home. There was never a doubt of my affinities, despite going to games with a schoolmate and his dad who were Tottenham Hotspur fans but attended the two grounds on alternate Saturdays. Maybe it is for that reason that I have never bought into the rabid “Stand up if you hate Tottenham” nonsense. To waste time on inferior neighbours seems to me crass. That said, it is reassuring to see them several places below us and cause for a properly malicious chant that the Johnny-come-lately moneybags from the Kings Road are lingering a place beneath the mighty Huddersfield Town.

As a child I savoured stories of the great Arsenal team of the 1930s. I knew of Herbert Chapman, Alex James and Cliff Bastin even if my own heroes, in the leaner years of my infant initiation, were Joe Baker and George Eastham. Those, like my daughter, who have been fans for only the past ten years, have been fortunate beyond their comprehension in the football they have witnessed. The parentheses for her have been provided by Dennis Bergkamp. He has been there throughout her time, bestriding each season with touch and vision to make hardened hearts swoon. She has worn his name on her shirt throughout and will doubtless go on doing so even after Saturday’s tearful farewells.

Bergkamp, along with Arsène Wenger, gave Arsenal the confidence to play with swagger, speed and an entertainment value that Liverpool can never hope to match. The Arsenal of the 21st century, with a vibrant young team and a spanking new stadium, have their supporters — notoriously restrained though we are — in a seventh heaven. So Liverpool are a fraction ahead of us? Dream on.

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