With so many of the Arsenal u23s’ squad seemingly traveling to Nottingham Forest for the EFL Cup, the team were absolutely dominated by Everton u23s on Monday night.

The Young Guns lost 5-0 with goals from Dowell, Walsh, Niasse and Callum Dyson (x2) leaving the team humiliated.

Everton are now top of the Premier League 2 table, while Arsenal continue to struggle near the bottom.

One explanation for this particular result, as Jeorge Bird points out, is that many of our first choice youngsters trained ahead of Arsenal’s EFL Cup clash against Nottingham Forest and will probably be involved in that squad.

In fact, Matt Macey, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Krystian Bielik, Chris Willock, Gedion Zelalem, Ben Sheaf, Stephy Mavididi, Marc Bola and Josh DaSilva were all left out.

This left our u23s depleted and inexperienced. However, you’d still expect at least some sort of performance from the boys who remained and this doesn’t explain the poor run of form leading up until this point.

Hopefully they can come back from this.

Arsenal lineup: Keto, Johnson, Da Graca, Pileas, Bola, Nelson, Bennacer (C), Smith-Rowe, Dragomir, Mourgos, Nketiah.