zep... i thought a draw would suffice but the team just kept pounding and pounding... and got the 2nd. Wigan missed out some clear cut chances, but so does Henry, baptista, Rosicky and Adebayor. had all converted, it'll be 6-2. :D hehe
anyway, here's something i found online.. source from lowyat.net.. dunno where he linked from though. :)
Arsenal can expect a call from the Guinness Book of Records very shortly thanks to their ever-expanding global support.
The club's current official membership figure now stands at approximately 175,000 - ahead of such heavyweights as Barcelona, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Glasgow Celtic and Bayern Munich - and enough to fill The Emirates nearly three times over.
All are fully-paid up in one of a number of members' schemes set up by the club prior to the move to the new stadium last July.
And the figure comfortably beats the current highest membership which, according to the famous chronicler of records, belongs to Portuguese giants Benfica.
The famous Lisbon-based club, it states, officially have 161,000 paying members.
Arsenal's global standing has risen sharply in recent years and shows no sign of receding with millions of supporters around the world.
According to the club's official encyclopedia, the most recent estimate in 2005, by Granada Media, which owns 9.9 per cent of the club, put the worldwide figure at 27 million fans - making Arsenal the unofficial third best supported club in the world.
And attendances, since moving to the new 60,000-seat stadium in Ashburton Grove, Holloway, have jumped by around 57 per cent.
The Gunners are now on course for the highest aggregate attendance in a season.
Encouragingly, 29,000 of those 175,000 - a decent average gate for most Premiership clubs - are members of the Junior Gunners scheme, the most successful of its kind in British football and a "market leader" since its inception back in 1983.
Little could the club have realised at the time just how much it would grow.
The junior membership arm of Arsenal now employs seven full-time staff alone.
However, this is not the first time the Gunners have enjoyed such wide support stretching to all four corners of the globe.
In the inter-war years Arsenal were recognised as the biggest and most famous club side in world football, thanks to the rock-solid foundations laid by Herbert Chapman.
A remarkable story which the fascist press in Italy cooked up - an eccentric snippet of propaganda, even by Benito Mussolini's standards - underlined the club's unrivalled fame at the time.
The self-styled Il Duce tried to use the supposed plight of one of Arsenal's major stars - Cliff "Boy" Bastin - to lift morale when reports surfaced that the winger had been captured during the Battle of Crete in 1941.
For several days the calcio-mad Italians reveled in the news, until word filtered through that he was, in actual fact, manning an air raid post back at Highbury.
The legendary Hungary and Real Madrid star Ferenc Puskas grew up in Budapest following the Gunners as a little boy and Cuban president Fidel Castro has been a supporter for much of his life, further showing the club's appeal across the continents.
The communist revolutionary even once juggled official engagements to watch the Gunners live in action in France, during a 1-0 win at Auxerre in 1995.
Nine successive Champions League campaigns, a foreign legion of players - 14 nationalities make up the current 45-strong squad - and the Premiership's extraordinary international success have propelled Arsenal's standing in hitherto untouched areas such as Africa and the Far-East - there is even a dedicated TV programme on the club in Japan.
Now Arsenal will hope the man responsible for so much of the club's progress, manager Arsene Wenger, will stay to continue his extraordinary work.
The Frenchman only has 18 months left of his contract remaining and the club are desperate for him to sign a three-year extension. "I am convinced he is going to stay," chairman Peter Hill-Wood was quoted as saying this week. "You look how much better this team will be in five years time and I honestly believe they will be world beaters."
