Premier League predictions: Chris Sutton faces rapper and Arsenal fan Dapz on the Map

Dapz is from Birmingham and earlier this year he teamed up with UB40 and Gilly G to make Champion – the official anthem of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, which were held in his home city. However, he is a lifelong Gunners fan.

“I’ve been supporting Arsenal since 1996, so it’s been a bit of time now,” he told BBC Sport. “It’s only because of my dad – he’s not a massive football supporter but he used to follow them because he had family in north London.

“So I ended up following them too, but I am much more of a serious fan than my dad is.

“I had quite a few heroes when I was growing up – Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Robert Pires are definitely up there, but there were so many to choose from.

“I would say that the Invincibles era [when Arsenal went unbeaten for the entire Premier League season in 2003-04] was the best football ever. No-one’s done it since, have they?

“But that team didn’t just win things, we did it in style too.

“The aim now is to emulate that and I actually don’t think we are that far away. The way Mikel Arteta is building his team, I feel like we are maybe two transfer windows away from being at that level again.

“By signing people like Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko, who have won it and done it, he has brought a winning mentality to the squad.

“It’s not just the big games where we are different now, it’s against teams where in the past we were expected to brush them aside but ended up losing. We’ve eradicated that now, and we are hard to beat even when we don’t play well.

“I didn’t expect us to be top right now, but I am not surprised by our results because this has been coming. I watched us in pre-season and we looked like we meant business, and then we made a big statement when we went to Crystal Palace for our first game.

“In the past we had it in us to lose that, with everyone waiting for us to mess up, but we won and we have not looked back since. Even when we lost to Manchester United in August, we were the better team.”