Laurent Koscielny attempted to explain the shambles that was Arsenal’s second half performance against Bayern Munich on Wednesday night.

The captain was subbed off early in the second half after he felt a pain in his thigh. At the time, the scoreline was 1-1 and the players seemed focussed. However, after Gabriel was brought on in his place, everything went wrong with Arsenal conceding two goals in six minutes and ending the match 5-1 down.

Kos believes that this was because the lads didn’t stay compact enough although even he doesn’t seem to know what really went wrong.

“I don’t know either [what went wrong],” the centreback admitted.

“I think the first half was good – we were deep, like you need to be, and tried not to give them space or opportunities to score. It being 1-1 at half-time was good for us but after we conceded the second goal, I think we needed to stay more compact because we had a second leg at home. When you can win [there], you need to stay together, defend together with all 11 players and keep this. Tonight we didn’t.

“Bayern played very well – they have some top-class players who can make the difference in front.”

The defeat to Bayern wasn’t just huge in the sense that it was an embarrassing loss; you get the sense that a lot of the players realise that change is needed and while they’re partially responsible for the performance, I think most know that we’re coming to the end of an era.

There’s only so many times we can push our players out for post-match interviews and make them repeat the same, rehearsed clichés in an attempt to explain our form.