It's early Tuesday the 21st, Thanksgiving's just around the corner, and I'm feeling like a voodoo doll for the Arsenal football club , the ones who play at Highbury in North London. Let me explain...

I've liked Arsenal ever since Arsen Wenger (how could you not like an English team called Arsenal Gunners being coached by a tall, elgant Frenchman called Arsen?) took over in the 90s. Wenger and the French/Dutch foreign core of those teams changed British football into something that preserved the hard-nosed toughness of the Premiership and added a level of elegance, imagination, and precision whose combination really couldn't be matched anywhere except for in Italian soccer. But Arsenal also had a kind of good-guy straightforward moral character left over from its days as an honest North London side that liked to tie 0-0. Italian football is always thought of as cynical for a variety of good reasons. Not to mention that Arsenal was always racially very mixed and seemed to be okay with it, which isn't always true in football (I knew a guy once Calusha, Zambia's star forward, who played at PSV Einhoven for a number of years and he told me how the black guys on Holland's team didn't even talk to the white guys because the locker room was so racist. And France has had feuds before too. It's soooo fucking sad.) It was and is Wenger's ability to be rational/fiery, human/scientific that held it all together. That and a real horse trader's ability to see player quality, buy low, and sell high. Now Arsenal is an institution, just like Chelsea and Man United. Now people love to hate their elegance. What better testament to what they've done?

Over the years the Dutch guys there-- Bergkamp, Obermaars, V. Persie and the Frenchmen-- Henry, Vieira, Pires, Petit have been the talent that made the ball move and tough hard-nosed British defenders-- Adams, Campbell, Cole have held the bottom line together. Now Arsenal, as the English Premier League has become the class of Europe, have become more new Arsenal than ever. I mean they have skill and class at every position and when they play well it's like watching the inevitable happen. The players move on silent clues, the angles open up wide, the ball slides into space perfectly weighted, they finish with class. Wenger has stretched his horse trading into Eastern Europe (Hleb, Rosicky), Spain (Fab), Africa (Toure), and still has his nose for the French and Dutch.

So what's the problem? And why am I feeling like a voo doo doll? Well Arsenal aren't doing that well. They are ten points back of Chelsea and Man U, they tied at home against a really boring Newcastle over the weekend, and they can't score enough goals. But when you try to figure out what's wrong, it's very difficult. Henry is still one of the best three forwards in football. Rosicky is impossible not to like. The back four is savage: Toure, Thuram, Gallas, Eboue. The midfield is clinical and precise: Hleb, Fabregas, V. Persie, Flamini.

The issue, apart from the fact that Vieira is now at Inter Milan and will be one of those guys people realize later on was the best at his position in his generation, is that Arsenal lacks mojo. They are almost everything to all people and they are not even enough for themselves. They don't tackle that well in the middle either.

Reasons: Exactly what everyone says, which is depressing, they have no identity. They are an English club with NO Englishmen, in spite of still having one of the best youth systems in the world and playing in North London, which is not like the most cosmopolitan place on earth even though it's changing. They play so beautifully that they raise their opponent's level of play more than their own. They are a polyglot bunch and interracial on top of that.

Point being everything that makes me love them, dooms them. They've resurrected me before by clicking at some point and running out the table. But right now I'm feeling low. Wenger is the Professor X of football to Ferguson's Magneto though, and we'll see what happens this year.

The voo doo doll thing is that I feel like I'm playing life pretty good right now, that the line-up of voices in my head is pretty great, that I'm trying to do something beautiful, and that it's not working as well as it should. The goals aren't coming. Look at Henry's expression. How did I miss?