Laurent Koscielny revealed that he felt pain in his right thigh before the end of the first half against Bayern Munich but tried to play on.

Speaking to the media in France, the defender said he also hoped that he had come off before he’d done any real damage to his thigh.

The ‘real damage’, of course, came on the pitch after he left it.

It’s quite easy to draw a straight line between his withdrawal and Arsenal’s collapse, but one player should not be that important to any side.

Can you think of one other ‘top’ team that would fall apart like that because they had to replace one player? Yet it happens to Arsenal time and time again. Once incident that they can’t cope with, one collapse.

Speaking after the game, a visibly upset Arsene Wenger, said, “If you ask me would I have loved to have kept Laurent Koscielny on the pitch, I’d say ‘yes’. After that, it’s difficult to measure the real impact. We have to cope with the result. No matter what we say now, it will be turned in a way that is detrimental to us, because we had an extremely bad result tonight.”

It is unlikely that Kos would have played any part against Sutton United in the FA Cup on Monday night.

That should give him just over two weeks for the problem to sort itself before we face Liverpool. At Anfield.