Morning all, As Andrew M mentioned yesterday, he’s travelling to Budapest this morning, so you’ve got me on cover duty before I make my own journey tomorrow. I had every intention of writing some heartfelt reflection on what’s happened over the last 10 days, but speaking frankly, my brain is completely fried. I think I’ve finally got a grip on my emotions after a week of randomly welling up while watching videos, reading articles and generally drowning in Arsenal content – if you missed any, Lewis has put this together – but it also feels like my mind and body are trying to conserve whatever energy is left before we go again at the weekend. I know I’ve had an incredible time celebrating the title win, but when you wake up on a Monday morning with absolutely no memory of skipping down the street holding a flare, or the minor collision with a car that unfolded after I dropped my phone while waving said flare, you can understand how the last week might have taken a physical toll. Amazingly, 21-year-old me handled Arsenal’s celebrations in 2004 far more responsibly than 43-year-old me has managed this week. I was lucky enough to be at Highbury when the Invincibles secured their moniker against Leicester, but I was sitting on my own in my uncle’s seat in the East Stand, didn’t hang around particularly long after the trophy lift, and skipped the parade entirely. It sounds absurd now, but after the Doubles in 1998 and 2002, plus the FA Cup in 2003, it genuinely didn’t feel like that huge a deal. I took it for granted. Plenty of others did too. I was watching footage of the 2004 celebrations, and they claimed only 50,000 people lined the streets of Islington. It felt like twice that number turned up for an impromptu street party last Tuesday alone, and there were probably even more around on Sunday. Nobody seems to be taking anything for granted this time around. The AST, quoting the club and police, say at least 500,000 people are expected on the streets next Sunday. That’s an astonishing number when you consider a decent chunk of season ticket holders will still be in Hungary. At the same time, I know people who have, or will be, jetting in from all over the world. God knows what happens if we actually win the Champions League. We’re talking Notting Hill Carnival levels of chaos at that point! Understandably, the logistics are complicated. For a start, the parade route has been extended to nine kilometres, far longer than anything the club has attempted in the past. Not only does it incorporate Upper Street, but also the length of Holloway Road, Seven Sisters Road and Essex Road. For safety reasons, they’ve also had to abandon any plans for a static trophy lift, the kind we saw outside the Emirates after the FA Cup wins in 2014 and 2015, and more recently for Arsenal Women’s Champions League celebrations. Instead, the players will remain on the bus throughout, and supporters will have to make do with roadside glimpses of the silverware as it passes by. And yes, it will be trophies plural no matter what happens in Budapest, because Arsenal Women will also be showing off the FIFA Women’s Champions Cup. That’s a nice touch. My flight lands back at Gatwick at 11am, so I’m not especially confident about securing a decent viewing spot. I never did manage to find that elusive Airbnb overlooking Islington Town Hall, sadly. Still, I’ll head north and see what vantage point I can find. Will I be flashing a wildly out-of-date press card at police officers to sneak through cordoned-off roads as I did 12 years ago? I prefer not to speak… You do wonder if the scale of all this has taken the club slightly aback. Certainly, Gary Neville seemed stunned by the prevalence of Arsenal fans around the capital last weekend. Speaking to co-chair Josh Kroenke and CEO Richard Garlick on the latest episode of The Overlap, not something I’d usually admit to watching, I should add, he shared self-shot footage of the red and white masses as he tried to escape White Hart Lane. “It was unbelievable,” was Neville’s assessment, at which point Ian Wright rightly pointed out that those scenes were being replicated all over the world, most noticeably in Africa. Honestly, some of the videos coming out of Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, with crowds so vast in scale, barely looked real. I had to double-check they weren’t AI-generated. “We’ve managed to unlock that potential, awoken the giant, poked the beast, whatever you want to call it,” said Garlick in response. “In terms of the amount of fans now interacting, it’s just unbelievable.” I have to say, I thought Josh Kroenke came across very well when he spoke. If he didn’t fully understand Arsenal, or football culture in this country, when he joined as a non-executive director in 2013, and to be fair, he was still only 33 at the time, it’s safe to say he gets it now. Like a lot of people involved in this project, he’s done plenty of learning on the job. The Super League fiasco remains a particularly stubborn stain on the record, while the much-memed “I would say be excited” line about our 2019 transfer business, including the £72 million signing of Nicolas Pepe, highlighted a naivety, since shaken off, that splashing cash alone would somehow solve Arsenal’s problems. It didn’t, but he, his dad and the wider KSE enterprise got there in the end, in no small part because they trusted Arteta to oversee the necessary cultural reset. The challenge now, of course, is staying at the top, both on the pitch and off it. Easier said than done, but solid foundations are in place after six years of forward progress, and collectively, the people running things have shown they can cope with major personalities leaving along the way. Whether the structure could withstand Mikel’s departure is something I’d rather not think about right now. Anyway, all the signs suggest our manager will sign a new contract in due course. A thousand words down and barely a mention of Saturday’s Champions League final. That probably says everything about where my head is at right now. Even though it’s a flying visit, it goes without saying that I’m incredibly excited and very fortunate to be heading to Budapest. I managed to snaffle a pair of tickets through the UEFA ballot before we’d even beaten Atletico Madrid. That, coupled with booking accommodation last August, has at least helped reduce the stress I know many of you have faced in planning this trip. For many supporters, it really is a planes, trains and automobiles operation. If you’re setting off over the next 48 hours, safe travels. Maybe I’ll see some of you in the Arsenal fan park… Please, I ask you now…DO NOT GIVE ME ANY PYROTECHNICS TO PLAY WITH! Until next time. The post Poking the beast appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.