My Lucky Hat, Or, An Existential Crisis.

Jay-Z, the ultimate Yankee Gooner.

Before I started following the Arsenal, I’d always read articles about obsessive fans touting lucky talismans (talismen?) as the reason for their team’s victory. I found them a bit ridiculous, of course -- how could the fact that you wore the same pair of underpants for every game be anything besides rather unhygienic? That was, of course, in the era of B. A.

Since our love for the Red & White began, we’ve all begun accumulating habits, starting with wearing red on match days, followed by NYC Gooner pins, and more recently with shirts and scarves. Jack and I used to go to the Park Slope Dunkin’ Donuts every morning before matches (more a necessity when leaving the house at 8.30am), and there was a run of matches with goals scored while Max was putting money in the parking meter outside, but nothing had taken on any truly obsessive veneer until The Hat.

In the past month, we’ve moved to Brixton (South London for those keeping track), land of hoodies and baseball caps, so I’ve taken to wearing my Yankees cap when the weather permits. This, combined with my fond memories of Yankee-Arsenal fans at Nevada Smith’s, is why I found myself on the afternoon of the first Bolton match in the Arsenal Tavern wearing red, white, and blue.

That match, I had the hat on from the start, and we all know how that turned out (2-0 to the Arsenal.) The following week’s Bolton rematch, we went to the Twelve Pins and I removed my cap for the first half. We went two down. Hat came on, we won 4-2 and went top of the league.

It seemed obvious really, almost too perfect. We couldn’t score goals without the hat; we couldn’t stop scoring goals with it.

Then came the night that tested my faith. Although be-hatted for the whole match, we went down 3-1 to Stoke. Just like all irrational obsessives, I quickly found an excuse: it was a FA Cup match, so clearly the hat only worked for the Premiership.

My hat wasn’t my only totem, though. The two matches where I wore my new Rosicky shirt and he played, he made major contributions: the injury-time equaliser that salvaged a draw from the Everton match in January, and the first goal in that stunning comeback against Bolton.

Then came Aston Villa. The hat and the shirt were both on to provide the maximum amount of luck clothing could provide for the beginning of a wretched stretch of fixtures. The unhappy end is fresh in all of our minds -- not even a flicker of hope illuminated what was just a stunningly unlucky match. To add insult to injury, Rosicky played poorly, with his two chances denied by cruel fate, the bar, and Aaron Ramsey. By the end of the match, I threw the hat to the floor and stomped on it for good measure. The dream was no more. The lucky hat had lost its luck.

And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, with Manchester United less than twenty-four hours away and Liverpool and Chelsea looming on the horizon. A new strategy is needed…but what?

Let us know if you have any surefire lucky rituals (and if you do, please, please do them extra for tomorrow.)