Arsenal lost again, this time going down meekly 2-1 at home to Wolves and, as they struggled to create chances, Arsene Wenger and Mesut Ozil were on the tip of a lot of Arsenal fans’ tongues.
It is exactly one year to the day that Arsenal sacked Unai Emery. How fitting that we marked it with a dour defeat in his honour.
I would be fairly confident in assuming most Arsenal fans expected their side to have progressed more since the elder Spaniard was shown the door, pandemic or not.
While Mikel Arteta has Arsenal looking somewhat more sound defensively, these things are relative and it behoves us to remember just how bad we were under Emery.
This is not good.
13 points from 10 games is the lowest Arsenal tally at this point ever in a Premier League campaign. You have to go back to the 1981/82 season to find a start as bad as this, that’s before my almost-39-year-old sister was born.
Our captain, and only serious goal threat, couldn’t have looked less interested in trying to get something from this game if you’d covered the ball in honey-dipped razor blades and let loose a swarm of bees.
There is no creativity to be found in the team that is enough to compete at this level. We’re relying on Bukayo Saka, a player only old enough to vote two months before Arteta was appointed. What that will get us, I don’t know, but I know it won’t get us top four.
Wolves played well but they did nothing special. They didn’t have to.
At the time of writing ‘Ozil’ is trending on Tweetdeck at number 16. Arsene Wenger is a rising at 19, Unai Emery is riding high at number 12 and, unfortunately for him, Mikel Arteta is at number 4, behind only Arsenal, #ARSWOL, and Wolves.
Unlike in years gone past, fourth here won’t save Arteta.
Serious questions are now starting to be asked about his role in charge of the club…who would have thought that 12 months ago?