It might be time to start taking Arsenal and Mikel Arteta seriously after perfect Premier League start - The Warm-Up

No club invites scepticism like Arsenal. They always play nice football, they always score beautiful goals, and they always feel suspicious. Slightly hollow. As if at any moment Gabriel Martinelli might fall slowly forward and turn out to be just a stage prop, a painting of a brilliant footballer on a wooden frame. A potemkin team of potemkin players. A fraud made from frauds.

Judging by the way they went into last night's game, Aston Villa are subscribers to the theory. You check a car's tires by giving them a kick, and you check an Arsenal team's spirit - their up-for-it-ness - in much the same way. Into the shins. Into the back. Leave a bit. Leave a bit more. Morally shady, of course, but it has been shown to work.

How Villa made it out of the first half with just one yellow card is a mystery, though Arsenal were good enough, and collected enough, for it all to look rather futile. As if Steven Gerrard had decided that his team had better kick their way out of the incipient crisis; as if Gerrard couldn't come up with any better ideas. How Arsenal made it out of the first half with just one goal: another mystery. Or, perhaps, evidence of fraudulence.

Then it happened. Douglas Luiz swung a corner into the six-yard box, every defender melted into nothingness, and Aaron Ramsdale got stuck behind a Villa player. He flailed, he complained; the referee shrugged; the nation giggled. But then, moments later, it unhappened. Arsenal trundled up the other end, opened Villa up like a jewellery box, and plundered their way back into the lead.

That's the second time this season that Arsenal have responded to an opposition goal not by falling on their face, but by running up the other end and restoring the situation. This is, of course, one of football's great tests of spirit. It's all very well playing well when things are going well. What about a spot of adversity, hey? How d'you like them apples? How d'you like them apples when thrown at your heads? Oh, they've caught the apples. Oh, they're eating the apples.

Perhaps it would feel more suspicious for this team to have coasted through five straight victories without breaking much of a sweat. When Manchester City win easily it is evidence of their brilliance, or sometimes evidence of a crisis within English football, depending on the national mood. When Arsenal win easily, that just means the coming fall is going to be all the more spectacular.

So Arsenal hitting back at teams, Arsenal riding out bumpy patches, Arsenal finding ways to win games despite getting a bit of a kicking: this all sounds like the behaviour of a proper football team. Sure, the fixture list has been kind, but then perhaps that's just what a team needs when it's trying to get to good. You don't have to take Arsenal seriously as title challengers. But you do, it seems, have to take them seriously as a football team. An important step in the process.

Nice of Erling Haaland to give everybody one game, wasn't it? Not even a real game, but the Community Shield. But we got a week of solid content out of it: chuckles, Youtube compilations, insinuations of fraudulence. Stocks in "Our League" trended upwards, and also in "the Bundesliga tax". It was fun! It was a week.

Haaland now has nine goals in five games, with hat tricks in the last two. This is obviously ridiculous behaviour, and it borders on the impolite. What is he implying about the Premier League? Coming over here, treating it like the Bundesliga. Like the Austrian Bundesliga.

His first against Nottingham Forest came with his first touch of the game. His third of the game came with just the 101st touch of his Premier League career, which speaks to a brutal efficiency. A goal every 11 touches, more or less. That, in turn, is not always something we always associate with Pep Guardiola's footballers. The stereotype there is the team of midfielders: everybody busy, everybody moving, everybody taking and giving, asking and receiving. And along comes Haaland, who moves and darts and runs near post and far, but has little interest in the actual ball unless he can kick it into the net.

Perhaps Haaland's ridiculousness, allied to City's quality elsewhere, enables Guardiola to arrive at a modern update of the old broken team principle. Ten lads whose job it is to move the ball up the field and get it into the box - we're including Ederson there, he's basically a no.6 - and then, once it's there, an experimental hybrid of Gary Lineker and Ivan Drago to deal with it. They do their bit, and he does his. Everybody's happy.

What anybody else does about this, that's the question. If he carries on scoring at this rate, he'll finish the season with more than 60, and he'll plunge the league into a deep existential crisis. His first against Forest came with a run to the near post and a single touch. The defender, Joe Worrall, was hanging off his shirt, trying to push through him, trying desperately to achieve the dignity of a penalty. And it didn't matter. A six foot three central defender, as much trouble to Haaland as a leaf stuck on his shoe. He's not just a big lad. He's a big lad that makes other big lads look small.

It's that day again. The most important day in the footballing calendar. Sure, trophies and derby matches come and go, but it's today that we find out which clubs have won the transfer window, and which chief executives are in the mud.

Although, unless you're a Manchester United fan, it's seems your football club won't be taking over stewardship of Cristiano Ronaldo (one very careful owner, quite a few miles on the clock). Erik ten Hag says that United are happy with Ronaldo and Ronaldo's happy with United, which we're all taking to mean "Nobody wanted to buy him, and even Jorge Mendes' powers of creative dealmaking proved insufficient."

And so we wait to see what the combination of Cristiano Ronaldo: Supermegahyperstar and Cristiano Ronaldo: Substitute, Squad Player, Europa League Option does to Manchester United's famously harmonious dressing room.

But no matter! Arsenal need a midfielder and Liverpool need a midfielder and Everton need a new everything and Chelsea want a new everything and Nottingham Forest are still going. It is, at heart, an appalling spectacle: huge piles of money shifted around on whims, on hunches, in blind panic, the totaliser creeping upwards and the shouting getting louder and louder; people being shunted here and there, hearts broken and lives rearranged. It's not just that there has to be a better, quieter, more sensible, less wasteful way of organising all this. It's that we've made a party out of it.

Still, somehow, despite all that, the thrill of a move survives. Football is a results business, as the cliche has it, and that means it is a business of disillusionment. All the wonderful things that could happen are swept away, replaced by the one thing that does happen. Reality is sometimes disappointing, and almost always mundane. If they have a good window, then your football club will never contain so much possibility as at 11pm tonight.

Good stuff from Burnley's social media team, which is thriving in the post-Dyche era. But every time we see another version of this, we can't help but wonder how it looks to somebody who knows the film but not the meme-ification. Some poor Burnley fan trying to wonder why his club is sending round clips of an appalling serial killer looking at pictures of a footballer.

Ricardo Quaresma: not just an outside-of-the-foot cross. Shout out to the BBC and Marcus Alves for this look at Quaresma's long-standing role as a public opponent of anti-Roma racism in Portugal. Some mind-bending details in this one, including the revelation that some Portuguese shops place "ceramic frogs at their entrances as the animal is seen as a symbol of bad luck and evil, especially by elderly Roma. One of Portugal's biggest supermarket chains, Minipreco, had to apologise for doing this in 2019."

As Vitor Marques, founder and vice-president of the Portuguese Roma Union puts it, "We watched an entire country give Ricardo standing ovations and sing his name, but then the following minute those very same people will refer to us all as criminals when one of our own does something wrong. In other words, we are not all as talented as Ricardo when he succeeds, but if a single person from our group commits a crime we're all instantly thrown into the same bag and deemed a bunch of criminals? It shocks me every time I hear that."

A full midweek of Premier League football ends with Manchester United away at Leicester City. The game should finish about an hour before the transfer window shuts - sorry, slams shut - which is plenty of time for United to overreact to a bad result. Over to you, Brendan.