Match report – By the numbers – Player ratings – Video

Well, that was a dismal start to the new year. A self-inflicted defeat, more comedy shoot ourselves in the foot stuff, against a good team and with a squad literally down to the bare bones in midfield and attack, we had nothing to try and salvage the game with.

Think about this: we went to play Southampton, one of the league’s best performers this season, without a single one of our established central midfield players. Santi Cazorla has been playing the attacking midfield role, but behind him there was no Mikel Arteta, Mathieu Flamini, Jack Wilshere or Aaron Ramsey. That’s a reason, not an excuse, and that issue was exacerbated by the absence of an injured Danny Welbeck, an injured Lukas Podolski, an injured Yaya Sanogo, and a stupidly suspended Olivier Giroud.

I really shouldn’t have to reiterate that being without those players is a huge criticism of our set-up, but unless you make things crystal clear somebody will always take their own meaning. As I’ve said numerous times, the injuries are, right now, making football like trying to swim against the tide wearing lead boots. Look at the players missing, add Mesut Ozil to that list, even Diaby for a laugh, and it’s little wonder we found it hard going.

A central midfield pairing of Francis Coquelin and Calum Chambers – playing his first ever game there – did all right but you need that area of the pitch to do more if you want to get a result against Southampton. It’s hardly their fault but there’s not much in the way of invention or assurance from them, although Coquelin’s robust tackling was probably the high point of the Arsenal performance.

The game was dull, typical New Year’s fare, tired players on both sides having played a lot of football unable to lift the spectacle beyond the mundane. And I was fine with that. It never felt like a game which had a lot of goals in it, so if we could keep it tight and sneak one ourselves, that’d probably do the trick. Instead we gifted them a goal. When you consider the back five was, allegedly, our strongest, it’s annoying that area of team cost us the game when we were so weakened elsewhere.

You can certainly question Wojciech Szczesny’s decision to come so far out of his goal when it looked as if Laurent Koscielny had Mané under some measure of control, but so too the decision of Koscielny to bizarrely leave the Southampton player and retreat behind his keeper. He should have stayed on the man and allowed Szczesny to get back. As it was Mané was then free to curl in a left-footed effort which looped over everyone and drifted into the net in almost slow motion.

It was shambolic and completely avoidable. It could have been worse but for Szczesny saving from Ward-Prowse, but it was a single goal lead at half-time. Early in the second, Alexis forced Forster into a good save with what was probably our most dangerous moment of the match, but in the spirit of the season we felt one ludicrous goal wasn’t generous enough so we gave them another.

Debuchy cut out a cross in our 6-yard box, then dawdled, so Szczesny played a delicate little toe-poke directly to Tadic who finished at the near post to make it 2-0. What was going through anybody’s mind there I don’t know because I find it hard to understand things that stupid. And after that we went to pieces. They could have scored a hat-full. Pelle hit the post, Debuchy cleared one off the line after a dreadful, casual back pass from Koscielny left the keeper stranded, Ward-Prowse shot over with the goal at his mercy and we looked unable to react in any way.

Theo Walcott came on and did very little, bar one pass for Alexis which should have resulted in a red card for the Southampton defender. Instead the referee, as is their wont this season, bottled the decision and awarded on a yellow and a free kick which the Chilean curled just over the bar. It’s easy to say this morning that even against 10 men we’d have struggled, it might well be true, but we know from what happened against QPR that even teams as shit as they are can use the advantage. Still, it’s very much a ‘what if’ and also very much a side issue to what was, to that point, a woeful Arsenal performance.

The apparent acceptance of defeat with still plenty of time left on the clock was a frustration too. There were 20 minutes left plus injury time and we had Joel Campbell and Chuba Akpom on the bench. Ok, you wouldn’t put much money on either of them making the required impact, but at least let them try. Instead we waited until the 84th minute to throw on the 19 year old who, at that point, was coming on to play with 10 other blokes who knew the game was up.

Why the reluctance to even try? Is it because the manager has no faith in those players to do that? If so, what are they doing on the bench in the first place? Just making up the numbers, it seems. Joel Campbell is an established international player, he’s probably not as good as people want to think he is, but is he so bad that he couldn’t get 15 minutes plus injury time? Given how others played yesterday, are we supposed to believe that he couldn’t bring anything to the party?

Afterwards, the manager said:

We did not defend well enough in the final third, and we paid a heavy price for it today. I am disappointed because there was at least a draw in the game, and if we were better defensively we could have won it. We have given a lot, I cannot fault the attitude of the team but we were again haunted by the ghost of what we seen since the start of the season.

Haunted indeed, but there’s more than one ghost. The Ghost of Inconsistency. The Spectre of Injury. The Spirit of Bad Decision Making. I mean, I can understand why the players we had our there were tired and unable to play as well as we might like, but the mistakes we made are just additions to very long list of how we manage to fuck up games we really shouldn’t fuck up. It was a self-inflicted defeat, not just on the pitch yesterday, but off it since the summer and with our apparent inability to do anything at all to improve the injury situation – something which should be our number one priority. If we can’t find out how to improve, can we at least find out why we can’t find out? Anything.

If there was a league table of taking two steps forward and one step back we’d be sitting proudly at the top this morning. As it is we’re still just three points off the top four, but with January now underway and the transfer window well and truly open opening tomorrow, yesterday was yet more evidence that unless we do some good business, and quickly, this is a season that is likely to see us fall short of doing the bare minimum and all the implications of that.

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Finally, after his dismissal of Inter Milan’s desire to take Lukas Podolski, Arsene Wenger has more or less admitted something’s going on and it seems likely the German will be off during the January transfer window. He clearly wants to make room for Joel Campbell on the bench.

Till tomorrow.