Arsenal's Sunday stroll in the park.

Arsenal's Sunday stroll in the park.

Sunday lunchtime football always did have a peculiar ring to it. If somebody had suggested to you that at some point during its long and illustrious history English football would be hosting one of its favourite sports on a Sunday, your local church congregations would have been in complete uproar. They would have thrown up their hands in horror, devastated and crestfallen at the very thought of  football being played  on one of its most religious days of the week. This was both sacrilege and sacrosanct. How dare football impose its soul on its one day of prayer and worship.

So it was that Arsenal's devout supporters made the holiest of commitments to their latest Premier League victory against newly promoted Brighton and Hove Albion. This easy and frighteningly simple victory against a totally bewildered and awe stricken Brighton was so logically predictable that if Arsenal had closed their eyes for 90 minutes you suspected that the score-line would have been exactly the same.

For Arsenal gave us the usually commendable passing masterclass that eventually turned into another art exhibition. Brighton had nothing to be ashamed of because this was the kind of game for Arsenal that remains just a day at the office. Arsenal's pure footballing pedigree showed no signs of being spoilt by those Sussex day trippers whose minds were much more concentrated on Premier League survival and a determined avoidance of defeat in every game that comes their way.

Still this was business as usual and the white collar workers of Arsenal comfortably dealt with brief moments of blue and white striped Brighton collars with a minimum of fuss. After that deeply distressing 4-0 defeat at Liverpool, Arsenal have reverted to type and have now gone back to playing football that clearly belongs to the world of the aristocracy rather than the more proletarian class, where the toilers and triers try desperately to keep their heads above water.

But from first to last minute Arsenal found that this was much more of a stately procession than they might have expected. Brighton simply built the flimsiest of defensive fortresses in case Arsenal were lulled into a false sense of security. Sadly the portcullis was sprung wide open and poor Brighton must have been so dizzy by the end of this embarrassingly one sided contest that somebody should have thrown some kind of towel onto the Emirates Stadium grass.

Once again Arsenal delivered football from the highest plateau, that throne of footballing domination, football that had a perfect purity and symmetry about it, football that had sweetness and streamlined sophistication and above all football with clean lines, natural expression and bounteous beauty. Sometimes the mind goes back to the 1990s when briefly Bruce Rioch was in charge of the Gunners. How different the story might have been for Arsenal had Arsene Wenger been left in the Far East.

This was another exemplary Arsenal performance that fully restored your faith in the Beautiful Game. Arsenal passed the ball among themselves so richly and perceptively that you began to think that football can be pleasing on the eye, something that can never ever be ruined or blemished by those long ball philistines who insist on smudging the bigger picture.

After their excellent containment of Chelsea at Stamford Bridge Arsenal have finally found their feet which may sound like the corniest of cliches but had to be perfectly applicable at the Emirates Stadium. Matches on their home turf may never cause any real problems for Arsenal but they may need a proper travelling suitcase away from the Emirates. The complaint made against Arsenal last season was that most of their away expeditions ended up with either muddled thinking, broken lines of communication and the occasional thrashing which happens to the best of the Premier League anyway.

Now though Arsenal have picked up all the right paint brushes and the canvas is ready for a lovely set of watercolours. Arsenal spread their passes across the wide and huge expanses of Arsenal's plush and luxuriant Emirates Stadium. It is  now that Arsenal can look back fondly on those halcyon days at their old Highbury, a team who could only have dreamt about the freedom and sense of liberation that the Emirates is now affording them

Undoubtedly this was Arsenal at their most ambitious and impishly impudent. Their football had the most remarkable originality and invention and by the end of this game against Brighton you could almost see the Gunners almost admiring their own excellence. At no point had they come out of first gear and when they did put their foot down it was for a leisurely spin in the country. Brighton looked terrified of their own shadows let alone taken aback by the breathtaking quality of Arsenal's football.

With Kolisanic at his most adventurous and buccaneering, Granit Xhaka, full of biting spikiness and splendid aggression and Aaron Ramsey controlling the Arsenal midfield with a studious footballing mind on his shoulders, Arsenal began to strut and swagger, smug and contemptuous, totally dismissive of their opponents and beginning to wonder how long it would take to break down a horribly brittle Brighton defence. The gaps in the Brighton defence were so painfully obvious that when Arsenal opened the scoring it could only have been a matter of time before the cavalry charged, the Light Brigade did their work and Arsenal got down to work in battering down Brighton's steel doors.

When Arsenal opened the scoring on the quarter hour mark, you could almost hear Brighton spirits drooping like the soggiest of dish cloths. When Brighton last played Arsenal in the top flight, Margaret Thatcher was still shuffling her cabinet and breakfast TV in Britain was still a novelty. This time though there was no iron resistance and even David Frost wouldn't have been able to decipher the Brighton mindset. They collectively pulled every man back behind Arsenal's relentless attack force before giving up at the first attempt deciding perhaps that this was not to be the day for challenging their superiors.

Arsenal went in front from a beautifully flighted free kick from the touchline and after the most temporary of goal mouth scrambles the ball fell invitingly to the most unlikely of goal scorers. Nacho Monreal, from a deep defensive full back position, trundled forward to the edge of the Brighton penalty aread and thumped the ball low past the Brighton keeper. True Brighton did hit the post and occasionally threatened Arsenal's back line but this was an Arsenal going about their business with the most professional and almost conventionally assured of performances. It was as if the upper classes had put the lower orders in their place. No surprises here then.

Once again the spotlight fell almost harshly on Arsenal's alleged misfit and sulking genius Alexis Sanchez. For most of this game against Brighton Sanchez frequently threatened to burst into tears, throw his toys out of his pram and insist that somebody give him a present simply for turning up. Football has always had to endure its spoilt prima donnas and there are  players who will only decide to play if the mood is right and a substantial reward can be guaranteed at the end of a game.

Chilean footballers are now more or less a complete rarity in English football. There was the classic case of the Robledo brothers who plied their trade for Newcastle way back when. But Chile are one of those middle of road international teams who so often flatter to deceive. Now Sanchez, once he'd made up his mind to play, began to look like one of the most outstanding players Chile has ever produced.

With those dark, swarthy features and a Latin temperament to go alongside it, Sanchez emerged as one of those stunningly imaginative strikers who can change a game in a matter of seconds. With a drop of the shoulders, lightning burst of pace, Sanchez spins away from his markers, running furiously like a greyhound, before bursting past defenders and then creating utter havoc against spellbound defenders. Once again Sanchez was at his most explosive and irrepressible. When Sanchez isn't cursing on the subs bench he is one of those exceptional footballers who demand our total respect.

Then we looked back in the middle of the pitch and found that Aaron Ramsey can still exert a decisive influence on a Premier League match. Without quite hitting the giddily exalted heights of previous games, Ramsey looks as if he'd like to be a Welsh Liam Brady, controlling games with both his mind and feet simultaneously. There is a quick wittedness and a wonderful intuition about Ramsey that often reminds you of a Brady at his very peak. Occasionally the Ramsey mind may become distracted by forces out of his control but he still looks the finished article.

At the back Mustafi, Rob Holding and Nacho Monreal held Arsenal's defence with an almost fiercely protective air about them. But all three looked so untroubled and unemployed that every time Arsenal launched their one of their innumerably measured raids on the Brighton goal, it almost felt as if unwelcome impostors had knocked on Arsenal's door late at night finding that everybody had locked up and gone to sleep.

Slowly but surely Arsenal stitched their intricate multi passing movements and it was rather as if the needle and cotton were in absolute harmony. The ball would flow across the length and breadth, in and out of the helpless wall of blue and white stripes before re-establishing its silky red Arsenal thread. In fact so large was their share of possession that the game had a training ground ambience about it. The passing was quick and accurate, short and precise, decisive and incisive, punishing and penetrative. There was never any  hint of hesitation, deviation or ambiguity about Arsenal and the second goal half way into the second half was the sweetest icing on Arsenal's cake.

After what seemed a breathless blur of Arsenal passing that seemed to chant its way across the Emirates there was one of those moments that football fans carefully store away in their memory like a well preserved football programme. When the ball landed up at the feet of Sanchez you somehow knew that his mind was operating on a much higher level to the rest. Sanchez, in one swift movement of his body, back heeled the ball impertinently into the path of the impressive Alex Iwobi who moved with even faster feet to hammer the ball low into Brighton's net for Arsenal's second goal.

For the rest of this game Arsenal continued to stroke the ball around with all the time in the world. For poor Brighton this must have been like watching some cruel matador taunting a Spanish bull. But this was never some terribly barbaric blood sport because Brighton could still be comforted by the knowledge of a moderately good start to their season. They have their points on the board and although the season could be a long and agonising one they know without any shadow of a doubt that Arsenal will not be providing the opposition every week. Anybody for a stick of rock. Oh yes quite definitely.