Been spending the last few days travelling all over the place, so haven’t had the chance to write much about the shambles that our Arsenal Christmas has been since the good and battling point at Anfield. On 23rd December I thought “take that, we’re top, things are looking good” but having witnessed such a poor performance against West Ham, followed by a dreadful performance against Fulham, there is certainly a different feeling inside me.

James and I digested the West Ham show on the post-match review over on our Same Old Arsenal channel here, so I don’t need to go in to the details of that (and it’s kind of old news anyway). Then Amanda and James did the business on New Year’s Eve for the Fulham game and I have to echo their sentiment and disappointment, because it was a pretty shocking one if we’re all honest. And the central theme that we’ve had bubbling under the surface, that is now very clear to us all, is the problems we are having in the final third. IN the last couple of games our defence has been lapsing and has been poor and it goes to show you that you can’t rely entirely on one part of your team if you want to compete at the top. You need both ends functioning and this season so far our attacking hasn’t really been doing that.

Against West Ham we had plenty of people telling us it was an ‘off day’ and ‘one of those games’ that can happen. But when this has been happening so regularly, then happened again but to worser effect against Fulham, well we have to accept that there is a pattern that is emerging.

After the Fulham game Declan Rice talked about a ‘reset’. It feels like a big ‘reboot’ is needed because this team is nowhere near good enough to compete for the title right now. Liverpool have a bunch of players on five or four goals this season, but they have Mo Salah on 14. Imagine where we’d be if we had a player on 14 goals; I suspect you could probably add about ten goals to our season tally so far and that would equate to at least another six or seven points, that’s for sure. And that would have us happily sat at the top.

As it stands we are five points short and it feels like our title charge is ‘on hold’ for the foreseeable future. It might even be over unless we get better at breaking teams down and stop conceding stupid goals like we have been doing. In the last five games it has felt like we are fighting for a Champions League spot; for the first 15 games it felt like we were fighting for a title. We are 12th in the league for ‘goals-per-shot’ – that’s terrible for a team towards the top of the league and suggests that we have real problems in this side right now. How do you fix it? More training? Extra practice? Re-watching of videos? Or do you acknowledge that in the attacking positions we play the same players again and again and we find ourselves with little plan B?

It’s January 2nd right now and the window is well and truly open. Yet over the Christmas period the noises I heard were that we were looking at getting in another defensive reinforcement in for January. You look at the fact we have had Zinchenko miss out against Fulham, that Tomiyasu has been injured and there are rumours about White playing through an injury and you can see why that might be the case, but if it is also the case that there has been a limit on what we can spend or how many bodies we can bring in, then surely given the attack is failing so much right now, we need to be looking at the sharp end of the pitch, no?

On New Year’s Eve we started with Eddie Nketiah and he was utterly anonymous. Saka got his goal early on but was poor again after that, whilst Martinelli looked to have lots of running and energy about his game, but his end product once again left a lot to be desired of. And our main man that we all love – Gabriel Jesus – is great for the team but misses so many opportunities that it does eventually ending up costing us when we see the kind of defensive lapses we’ve seen. When you add to that the fact that Reiss Nelson is not trusted other than pretty dead moments towards games and that Trossard isn’t having the same impact that we’ve seen him have last season, it suddenly feels like the problems in attack are going to halt any fading dreams of challenging for the title.

In my head it kind of feels like it’s getting to the point where it’s ‘done’ already. Liverpool are five clear of us, City are level but have a game in hand and everyone has said they’ve been poor this season (some of their fans have even commented on it), but more worryingly than that we haven’t really played amazingly all through this Premier League campaign. We’ve done it in the Champions League, but in the Premier League the Brighton game is the one that really stands out, and that was a game that felt like the story was about our “control”. We’ve heard a lot of that this season, but so far it has got us to fourth in the league and playing some pretty ugly stuff at times.

We all got bored of Wenger and his ‘handbrake’ commentary. It feels like Arteta has inserted a handbrake in to this teams’ mechanics and we’re all suffering as a result.

I should probably wrap this up for today, but despite all of this and despite what I’m sure you are thinking is a quite negative undertone to this blog today, I do trust Arteta and I do think we have a very good team. There are some positives that we’ve seen and let’s not forget how many injuries we’ve had that many pundits appear to have forgotten about. But it feels like something has gotta change for our season to really ‘kick on’ because as it stands, we’re in for a fight to keep our Champions League position unless we do something in the next few weeks.

Catch you all tomorrow.