For an hour at West Ham on Monday, we were scratching around for fluency and form. As Arsene Wenger used to say, we were "playing with the handbrake on".
Then everything changed.
Gabriel Martinelli was the goalscoring catalyst, Nicolas Pepe fizzed in a spectacular second and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang rounded off a memorable nine minutes.
Freddie Ljungberg knows from his playing days how confidence can grease the wheels of a team's performance, and he hopes that this week's injection of self-belief will smooth the path to improved results.
"A win does a lot of good when you haven't had one for a long time, and the players have felt it," he said.