Forget Alexis Sanchez, forget the transfer gossip - this was Arsenal rediscovering football's simple joys

On a freezing afternoon in north London, Arsenal rediscovered their happy place and reacquainted themselves with the simple joys of football

It was tempting to try and remember the last time the Emirates had felt quite this gaily carefree (Getty)

And breathe. For 90 blissful minutes at the Emirates, nobody was leaving or joining Arsenal. Nobody was quibbling over the fine print of a contract or going twelve rounds with Mino Raiola. Nobody was glued to Sky Sports News in search of the latest snippet of transfer gossip.

No: for an hour and a half, all that mattered was that Arsenal were absolutely battering Crystal Palace, and looking damn good while doing it. On a freezing afternoon in north London, Arsenal rediscovered their happy place and reacquainted themselves with the simple joys of football.

As the songs rang out and Mesut Ozil knocked the ball around with breezy, nonchalant abandon - instep, outside of the foot, laces, heel, some other unidentifiable part of the boot that only he really seems to possess - it was tempting to try and remember the last time the Emirates had felt quite this gaily carefree, when it had last felt quite this fun, from rocking start to rolling finish.

There was the 3-3 draw against Liverpool, of course: plenty of fun for the neutral, surely too fraught and nerve-shredding by half if you were a home fan. The 6-0 win against BATE Borisov was a good, salty romp in the grass that nonetheless had absolutely nothing riding on it. Even the 5-0 against Huddersfield was deceptively tense for an hour until Arsenal finally broke the game open.

So we’re going back at least a couple of months here. That’s a lot of games, a lot of minutes; a lot of money, if you’re a regular visitor to these parts. A lot of time spent not having fun. We’ve dwelt on quite a few bad Arsenal days of late. It’s only fair, then, to dwell on a good one.

Roy Hodgson watches on, helpless to his side's implosion (Getty)

Palace were awful, there’s no getting past that. For a Roy Hodgson team, it was alarming how quickly they lost their shape and discipline. They played like a team with the flu. As things started getting really bad for them, they started thinking about how bad things were getting, and so of course things got worse. Only when they went 4-0 down after 25 minutes, and all hope of rescuing the game had finally ebbed away, did they knuckle down and start playing again.

But partly Palace were awful because Arsenal made them look awful, and partly Palace’s individual errors were forced because during those first 25 minutes Arsenal were simply too dazzlingly quick for them: quicker to the ball, quicker to see the pass, quicker to play it. Jack Wilshere cut the Palace midfield to ribbons. Ozil and Alex Iwobi played like they had actually met before. Alex Lacazette made runs without getting offside. It just flowed, in a way that would have been hard to foresee at kick-off.

Perhaps that’s just what an early goal will do for you. It’s almost five years since Arsenal failed to win at the Emirates after scoring in the first 10 minutes, and the flourish and flurry that followed Nacho Monreal’s early header merely reinforced the impression that Arsenal are still very handy front-runners.

By the time Iwobi had converted Monreal’s cross, Laurent Koscielny had bundled the ball home and Lacazette had poked in for 4-0, Hodgson was beginning to cut an increasingly forlorn figure on the touchline: not seething, not apoplectic, just a little bit sad, like someone watching a video about the Amazon deforestation on YouTube.

Alexandre Lacazette complete the rout with Arsenal's fourth (Getty)

So what about the other 65 minutes? Well, it was curiously inert: Wenger rolling substitutes on and off, Wilfried Zaha falling over and throwing his arms in the air at the injustice of it all, Arsenal still very much in control without ever really threatening to add a fifth. Indeed, it was Palace who got the game’s last goal through Luka Milivojevic’s fine chest and swivel.

And so as the final minutes dripped away, the Emirates returned to its preferred state: winning and yet still not entirely satisfied, just like the good old days. Not the actual good old days, but the days just after those, when Arsenal were still top-four shoo-ins and taking teams apart on a regular basis. In its own way, this whole afternoon was a sort of late-Wenger throwback.

Full-time arrived. A small cheer went up, and then everyone packed up their things and shuffled back towards the Tube station. Back to Arsenal’s new reality; back to the world of comings and goings, of signing-on fees and image rights, of message boards and tactics boards, of angst and anguish. But it was a delightful 90 minutes, as long as it lasted.