It wasn’t even a bad performance at the City Ground on Wednesday night.
The team was clearly better motivated, more ambitious, more aggressive and more incisive in its efforts to get forward. It was a 100 per cent improvement on the dross we were served up on Saturday against West Ham.
And yet, despite all of that, it wasn’t enough – not by a considerable distance.
That’s not to say that Forest deserved much from the game because I don’t think they did but it seems at the moment that teams can rely quite comfortably on the fact that Arsenal can’t hurt them in the final third or, if not that, they can be confident or smothering anything we do produce.
While there was an element of bad luck about Riccardo Calafiori’s effort which struck the post (it would have been a goal worthy of winning the match) there was precious little else we can point to and say ‘we should have won the game there’ or ‘that was an outstanding opportunity’.
Yes, we had the hosts under control from long periods of the match but to what end?
None of this is new I realise and none of this is anything but the inevitable consequence of having been decimated by injury in attack. We just don’t have the players or the attacking options to make a difference. Try as the manager might to make something work or to surprise his opponent with the unexpected, it simply isn’t working at the moment and, frankly speaking, in unlikely to.
We all know where this problem stems from and, the worse the predicament becomes, the harder it becomes to justify or contextualise the decisions we have seen over the last three transfer windows.
While the league title race is over, the race for a Champions League spot is not and we have to be careful now that our demotivation at having thrown the league away doesn’t become something more serious altogether. The manager is going to have to work doubly-hard to hold this ship together.
In the meantime, we have a Champions League double-header against PSV to prepare for and, on current form, it’s looking thrice as hard as it would have been even six weeks ago. We’re going to have to find a way to limp over the line and just pray we can recover some bodies between now and any subsequent round of fixtures.
That said, the prospect of getting past PSV only to face off against Real Madrid, with the side as it currently is, should fill all of us with dread.
For now, though, all we can do is pick over the bones of another insipid, turgid attacking performance and wonder where or if we might come up with a solution.
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