I will thrive with Van Persie, says Adebayor

If Arsenal's eventual failure in four competitions last season is measured statistically, one of the key points to emerge is the lack of goalscoring support for Emmanuel Adebayor. The crucial injuries suffered by Robin van Persie and Eduardo meant that no other player contributed more than seven league goals to add to Adebayor's 24. The evidence from Tuesday's 4-0 romp against Porto, however, was that a fit Van Persie can ensure extra help this time.

Adebayor certainly believes so. "There is a good relationship between him and me," he said. "He's looking fit and scoring a lot of good goals. We are just enjoying playing together up front. He's a very good player. I'm using him and he's using me as well."

Two goals apiece on Tuesday after Porto had created the better early chances gave Adebayor six for the season and Van Persie five. Both men now average well over one goal every two starts in their Arsenal career. Last season the Dutchman was effectively out from September until March, and Adebayor says they are only just beginning to find the same wavelength again: "Of course there is more to come. He's just back and we've only had five or six games together. Hopefully as we go game to game we will get to know each other better and learn how each other plays better. Robin is a good player and if he is fit for the whole season we have a chance to do something special, that's for sure.

"We know that if we had all our squad fit last season we had the chance to win something. Now we have quite a lot of players ready and fit to play every single game and that's good for the manager."

That manager, Arsène Wenger, was expected in some quarters to make greater use of his squad after so many first-team players – Van Persie among them – fell short in the traumatic home defeat by Hull last Saturday. Instead, strikers like Nicklas Bendtner and the young Mexican Carlos Vela, who scored five times between them in the Carling Cup rout of Sheffield United, were permitted only cameos, in which both nevertheless looked bright. Cesc Fabregas was back to something approaching his best and the watching England manager Fabio Capello must have been delighted at the pace, control and confidence exhibited by Theo Walcott down the right.

Wenger has now come to accept the Hull defeat as "part of the learning process" while insisting that his team have more work to do at Sunderland this weekend to atone for it.

"It is half of the response," he said of Tuesday's performance. "The other half comes on Saturday." Losing two-thirds as many League games before the end of September as they did in the whole of last season does not bode well for a first Premier League title in five years and it is probable that one of the other three targets offers the best chance of a trophy. Next up in the Champions League is a double-header against Fenerbahce, whose dull goalless draw with Dynamo Kiev allowed Arsenal to go clear at the top of the Group G table. Unlike such familiar opposition as Porto, the Turkish club offer the prospect of something different: Arsenal's only previous trip to Istanbul was for a Cup Winners' Cup tie almost 30 years ago.

Group G

Results: Dynamo Kiev 1 Arsenal 1; Porto 3 Fenerbahce 1; Arsenal 4 Porto 0; Fenerbahce 0 Dynamo Kiev 0.

Arsenal's remaining group stage fixtures: 21 Oct: Fenerbahce (a); 5 Nov: Fenerbahce (h); 25 Nov: Dynamo Kiev (h); 10 Dec: Porto (a).

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