JUST a very quick one to say: “Yes, I too feel utterly shit this morning.”

I’d understand the distribution of this season’s riches had we been half as bad as predicted at the start of the season.

As it is, a teaspoon of experience and cunning and a tablespoon of fortune have determined our lot.

The choice on May 21 is just utterly woeful:

a) Fergie goes two up in the Champions League stakes.
b) Ashley Cole wins the Champions Leaugue.
c) Liverpool’s theory that they are in any way good gains credence.

PLAYA RATINGS (FROM 25 MINS ON)

FABIANSKI
Perhaps he could have come for the first. Blameless for the second and looked ok for a debut.7

TOURE

At right-back square peg and round hole come to mind for Kolo, but seemed to enjoy himself.7

GALLAS
Can’t remember too much wrong - except one late challenge he almost injured himself in because he pulled out meekly.7

SONG
Has talent, but is not what we need at the back. Hardly impressed for either Derby goal.6

CLICHY
Usual shizza.7.5

DENILSON
Enjoyed the wide open spaces of Pride Park. Has had a stunted second season but does look decent back-up for Cesc.7

CESC
Classy touches at times and some real strength on the ball, without ever having to exert himself.7

EBOUE
Did alright actually, though frankly so would I given the space Derby were affording us. NEWS ALERT: Played whole game.7

WALCOTT
The clinical (a goal and an assist) and the not very clinical at all (very good chances for a goal and an assist).7

RVP
Nice to see him finally put his foot through a ball and thump it home. Subbed at half-time as a precaution.7

BENDTNER
Is he the finished article? No. Has it been a decent debut season? Yes.7

SUB: ADEBAYOR
Did the business pretty well. Amazing season let down by a five game lull really.8.5

SUB: GILBERTO
We lost cohesion when he replaced Denilson.6.5

SUB: DJOUROU
NA

Derby County 2 Arsenal 6
By Goodplaya, who missed the first 25 minutes.

I SPENT the first 25 minutes of this game hardly excelling on a five-a-side pitch.

A fairly apt warm-up for watching Derby, frankly.

They truly are woeful. Pub sides can at least hold some form of defensive line.

So all in all, it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from last night.

Before I got to the pub, Bendtner got the first after intercepting a stray ball, exchanging passes with RVP and finishing low across Carroll.

He was immediately congratulated by RVP and Cesc, in a moment that probably left dozens of amateur online psychologists and mind-readers reaching for the noose.

As I entered the pub, Derby equalised. Song conceded a crappy free-kick on the right and then demonstrated that for whatever talents he may have, he is not that missing beanpole central defender who will attack the ball. Rabbit in headlights would pretty much sum up his reaction to that cross.

Then RVP, who had already missed a sitter, chested down and slammed home from Kolo’s deft chip. Again, not a great Derby defensive line.

After the break we faffed around until Theo did well and fed Comrade Eboue. Talking of Comrade, you should read this interview with him. I think he may be serious. That or his whole act is ironic, in which case I for one was certainly fooled.

Anyway, back to the chance and you hardly need me to say that faced with an open goal, our free scoring right winger, fluffed his lines. Fortunately Adebayor, on for RVP, turned it in.

Then we really cocked about. Theo missed a sitter, other people screwed about and you just knew that amateur as Derby were, we’d still give them another.

And so it happened with Song caught up field thinking he was Franz Beckenbauer and Earnshaw left to slide neatly past Fabianski, who, from what I saw, had a decent Premiership debut.

For two minutes I wasn’t so much furious as completely apoplectic and was on the verge of embarrassing myself in an Eastish London pub containing no other Arsenal fans.

Fortunately, an Henryesque run and curler from Theo prevented the onset of convulsions and complete mental meltdown. Thanks Theo.

Clichy then went on one of his runs, squared it and Ade had actually timed his run perfectly to slide home. Another followed from what was basically a straight through ball.

Carroll’s judgment in coming out was embarrassingly bad and Ade had his second hat-trick against Derby.

Before any of the Adebayor bashing cretins point out how six of his Premiership goals have come against Derby, take them off and he’d still have more than Anelka got in his £24 million season with us. And from six fewer games. So there.

And that was that. We were sloppy at times, we were very fluent at others. Of the players who came in Denilson did fairly well and Bendtner was the usual mix of the good and the needs improving. You can only beat what is in front of you and sometimes when the opposition are that rubbish, they can drag you down a little too.

The win guarantees third place ahead of Liverpool, which is a massive relief because to finish below that shower would have been embarrassing.

It also keeps alive the distant prospect of the title. The permutations are amazingly and refreshingly simple really. Two games left and four points in it: if United or Chelsea win either of their’s or we fail to win one of ours, we can not do it.

If the above does go our way, United need to lose once too.

Realistically, United will likely make the above irrelevant when they entertain West Ham on Saturday.

But the fact we still have a mathematical hope with two games to go is a reminder of how small football’s margins are. Had our bad streak started a game later or ended a game earlier or had one or two decisions gone our way, we would be right up there now.

SO it has been the season of lucky handball penalties.

United did little to merit their one against us at Old Trafford. And they did little to deserve the one in the Nou Camp.

But then nor did Chelsea with four minutes left on Saturday. Small margins.

Saturday was also the day Tony Adams batted his eyelids and said “come and sign me”.

And sign him we should.

Not because Arsene can’t organise a defence (three league titles suggest he can).

And not because Adams is English.

But because he is Arsenal.

And that is a point that is relevant to far more than just the Adams situation.

A horrible, lazy idea that what Arsenal lack is Englishness is simmering.

Frankly, it teeters on racism.

Nobody would deny Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher bring something special to Liverpool. But what they bring is a knowledge of what Liverpool football club means that dates back years. It is not Englishness.

The same goes for John Terry at Chelsea and Scholes and Neville at United.

It’s great if you have those home grown players, but if like us you don’t, building your side with Justin Hoyte as it’s linchpin just ain’t gonna work.

“So go out and buy yourselves some English players”, the critics say. Find yourself winners like Lampard and Rooney, they argue.

Winners, they both undoubtedly are. But again, what does being English have to do with it? Winners, as we have proved over the past few years, come from all around the world. Nor is Michael Ballack English. Like Lampard and Rooney he is just a good (and expensive) player.

At the crux of the argument is the sloppiest logic imaginable. It goes like this:

Manchester United and Chelsea have an English core, Arsenal don’t. Right now Man U and Chelsea are winning trophies. Arsenal are not. Therefore the lack of an English core must be the answer.

Sod anything else, sod all the sides with English cores over the past 100 years who, like us, have not won anything. No, it must be our lack of Englishness.

Seriously, it’s a steaming, hot pile of you know what.

What we need are winners. Nationality is irrelevant.

And if we can build a team around players who know the club intimately because they have been there since adolescence then great. But as I said, that would be because they are Arsenal, not because they are English.

Moving on, and you have to say the judgment of the players in the PFA awards was spot on. Ronaldo was the only choice for the main prize, but at 23 he was rightly considered too experienced for the Young Player award, which rightly went to Cesc.

We have seen two kinds of form from Cesc this season: a) the exquisite b) the merely pretty good that is made to look very average by the exquisite. My point is that even in his dip, he was a lot more productive than many people gave him credit for.

On the team front, United’s defensive record makes Vidic and Rio deserved shoe-ins, but street-fighters Bacary Sagna and Gael Clichy quite rightly fill the full-back spots. Flamini was pipped by Gerrard and Adebayor quite rightly joined Cesc in the team.

It is one where the foreigners rule - seven of the 11 are from overseas.

It is Derby tonight and I’ll be seriously peeved should we fail to take it seriously. There remains a very small chance we could still do it.

It could only happen if the possible (us winning all three) is matched with the very unlikely (United taking just one point from two games) and the not inconceivable (Chelsea drawing at Newcastle) and the pretty unlikely (Chelsea drawing against Bolton at Stamford Bridge).

Highly unlikely. But a chance nonetheless. Which makes the idea of tinkering strange - even if injuries mean there is not a lot of tinkering possible anyway.

BY common consensus we have nothing left to play for this season.

I disagree.

Let us look at the three scenarios that could emerge from Stamford Bridge tomorrow:

a) A United win would guarantee they finish above us and would mean only goal difference madness could deny them the title.

But it would also mean that if we could beat Derby and then Everton at home in our final game at the Emirates, Chelsea would go to Newcastle on Bank Holiday Monday in third place, behind on goal difference and needing a win to regain second.

b) A Chelsea win would really crank up the pressure on United. They would go into their 2nd leg against Barca on a run of one league win in four, knowing one more slip up in their final two games could prove fatal.

It would leave open the possibility of us catching United. They would need to draw one of their remaining Premiership games and lose the other for us to stand any chance.

It would, of course, be a very slim possibility. But when the prize at stake is the league title, any possibility is one worth fighting for.

For us to take the title rather than just pip United for second, we would also require Chelsea to have that slip up at St James and then only draw at home to Bolton on the final day.

c) A draw would take in the Chelsea part of scenario a, because when the gap to be made up is four points (and we would likely have the better goal difference), two draws is the same as two defeats.

So Chelsea would still be there to aim for.

Technically, so too would United - though a draw against West Ham or Wigan would extinguish our chances.

Of course, all such scenarios require us to win our final three games.

But the point is that whatever happens, we will go into the Derby game either with a) a very small chance of the ultimate prize or b) a genuine possibility of nicking second, automatic Champions League qualification and the morale boost of finishing ahead of the Blues.

Both are worth denying the Rams a famous victory for.

PS: Those eight years were great Thierry, but as I suspect you well acknowledge, time has moved on.

A FEW brief words to Matthieu Flamini:

You have had an outstanding season - far better than I thought you ever capable of.

You are also undoubtedly talented. But if we’re honest, instead of being a born genius, you are a prime example of what David Dein was on about when he spoke of Arsene turning a good player into a very good player.

So, if you’re good enough to thrive without Arsene Wenger at Juve, you still will be next year or in a couple of years time. You will still be young enough too.

Go now and risk becoming the Steven Sidwell of Turin.

In the meantime, you have much left to learn at Arsenal. And much still to achieve.

I simply think a move now is wrong: wrong for us and wrong for you.

I could, of course, be wrong about you. I have been once already.

Moving on, and other than perhaps Ronaldo, no Premiership player has had his ankles hacked at more often this season than Alex Hleb.

The wayward studs have been unceasing.

And yet while the worst punishment dished out to the perpetrators has been a token yellow card, Hleb misses the final three game of the seasons after pawing Reading’s Graeme Murty with an open palm.

We can ponder what the locals in his native Middlesboro might have thought had Murty collapsed so spectacularly while on a night out.

And we can wonder why the FA react so brutally to harmless slaps (Aliadiere’s comes to mind), while hiding behind any excuse for inaction they can muster when confronted with far more cancerous sins.

Both are valid gripes. But they do not detract from the point that the rules are the rules and while others get even, we all too often get mad.

If Hleb felt on the end of rough treatment, all he had to do was stick out a sly leg the next time Murty came calling. The punishment? A yellow, at worst.

Instead he offered a pathetic soft slap and is lumbered with three games.

And he is not the only Arsenal player guilty. Emmanuel Eboue regularly steams in hands flailing everywhere, so too did Kolo and Adebayor in Cardiff and Cesc a couple of years back when sent-off at Goodison Park. Separately, William Gallas aimed that kick at Nani.

None of those incidents posed any greater threat to life or limb than a sly foul or a hefty shove to the chest. But they do attract much harsher punishments.

It needn’t be this way. Take Frank Lampard.

Whenever there is a melee, he is in the thick of it, pushing, shoving and throwing his weight around.

And yet whatever sly digs he makes, his hands will never veer above chest height. His overturned sending-off was a classic case in point: he pushed Boa Morte in the chest and aimed an ‘accidental’ kick at him as the pair fell.

Yet he escaped scot-free. Classic, clever, Lampard.

Ask yourself too when you last saw a Man United player do what Hleb did.

We still lack that little bit of cunning.