Embarassing second half. Men against boys. The gulf in class was huge.

Torreira did his best, Guendouzi showed glimpses of class before tiring. Kos did well. Aubameyang and Lacazette tried but had no service at all.

All in all we are just miles away and as sad as it seems to say we are probably for the forseeable future just also-rans.

Arsenal last 11 seasons away against the Big 6

v Chelsea W2 D1 L8
v Liverpool W3 D4 L4
v Man City W2 D2 L6
v Man Utd W0 D4 L7
v Spurs W1 D3 L6

Miles off. This will take years to correct. City dominated us more than we would dominate a league 1 team. That’s the gulf in class level we’re having to make up. Not sure many of our players even make their bench

So as we probably suspected at the start of the season. Our success or failure this season will come down to maybe 5 games in the later stages of the Europa League.

We are in a boring league of 1 in the prem. miles off the quality of the top 5 but not poor enough to join the likes of Everton and wolves in 7th

It wasn't like watching two top six sides, it was like watching one top six side versus a relegation candidate.

At the end of this season we need to tell mustafi and xhaka they aren’t wanted. If I never saw mustafi play again it would be too soon

Get some money in for replacements.

We will finish 6th

Most average looking Arsenal squad in my lifetime. We have only 4 players in the entire squad capable of playing to the level we need them to.

If Man U take Chelsea for the top 4 there could be an almighty Europa League final if it is arsenal v Chelsea. A game for European glory and the coveted champions league place.

And we benched two of them

If you struggle for quality in the squad the way to get results is to find some individual quality, and the best thing for that in these tough away games is wide men with pace and ability to beat a man. Counter attack and get players 1 v 1. We just don’t have those players. Too much meh in this squad. I’d keep maybe 8-10 of them and replace the rest

I thought that Lacazette battled well. And I was especially pleased that he wasn’t subbed as per usual.

A player like Iwobi should be nowhere near Arsenal’s first eleven every week. There’s not many premiership clubs he’s a starter for.

Average side

Not just him though is it? Lack of quality, nous and organisation all round really. Hoping that a quality player might over-compensate for all of that. A bit like Palace with Zaha.

It was frustrating to have the sound off here. I’d have love to have heard the half time and full time analysis by big Tone. The visuals gave a clue though.

Good luck attracting players in the summer, poor squad, terrible owner and no ambition.

he may as well have just stood on the half way line all game and done a massive poo...

The Özil situation is totally ridiculous

The team has no creativity at all yet he’s on the bench

I understand the manager may feel he doesn’t fit his system but *%^@*** hell whilst he’s here you need to find a way of using him.

I never want to see Lichtsteiner in an Arsenal shirt ever again.

And Kolasinac is turning into a real lazy get.

And how many goals against has Iwobi been responsible for now this season?

Not sure I'd call Kolasinac lazy; more simply, not good enough however hard he does or doesn't work. Plays most of his games at left back but he's an appalling defender. And below the level required for a midfielder. I've seen worse players. God I still remember bloody Morrow. But I'd be happy to see the back of him this coming summer.

I get that a lot of people say Arsenal need to be patient but the reality is the fans have been told to be patient for 12 years now.

For a long time I said rather tongue in cheek that if Wenger had been a secret agent for the last 10 years sent in to slowly make arsenal worse each season but not too worse to draw obvious attention to it he literally couldn’t have done a better job.

My synopsis of the squad based on current ability

Players good enough to be in a title winning squad:
??

Players good enough for a top 4 squad
Bellerin, holding, Torreira, Guendouzi, Lacazette, Aubameyang, Ramsey

Players good enough for a team 5th-8th
Leno, Sokratis, Koscielny, Özil(?) Welbeck, mkhitaryan

Players good enough for lower/mid table team
Xhaka, mustafi, Monreal, Kolasinac, AMN, Iwobi, Čech, elneny

Players for a relegation threatened team
Lichtsteiner, jenkinson,

I’ve left out Suarez and some of our very young players who aren’t fully first team squad or we haven’t seen enough of.

So if the aim is to get back in the top 4 that’s only 7 players (1of whom is leaving) you could make a case for Leno and Sokratis but it would be generous considering they have been part of a defence that hasn’t looked top 4 quality all season.

Some big changes required. Not even £200m turns this squad in to something decent

If you wound the clock back a decade if you criticised Wenger on here you’d be hammered by everyone. He was deemed a hero and unquestionable. Fast forward a few years and I was saying Wenger would leave us in a worse state than when he arrived and people still wouldnt have it. Now hes gone as our fans didn’t want to challenge him enough for way too long and his parting gift was that he wrecked our first team squad and screwed his successor.

We don't have any choice do we?, where we do have a choice is wasting time/money/emotion on the club, I will certainly be minimizing all of these, especially the 2nd one, haven't spend a penny on the corporation since Nov 2015.

Feck knows how anyone can motivate themselves to waste their efforts on this football corporation is beyond me, no wonder the Emirates always looks half empty, why on earth are they adding more club level seats?, always looks 1/4 full to me.

6th is the new 4th and that is not a good product to sell - up yours wiggy.

Emery has a very difficult job to re-establish Arsenal back in the top 4. What with lack of funds, yet more long term injuries and an inherited squad which is horribly unbalanced, he is understandably struggling to bridge the gap. He clearly needs time and money to implement his ideas. Yet when I hear that today, needing a goal to get us back in the game we couldn't even muster a single attempt in the second half, when he cant think of a way to utilise one of the best assist makers in Europe, and when you see Lichensteiner and Mustafi playing for Arsenal, I do start to doubt whether he will be successful.

After hearing so many Arsenal fans moan about Mike Dean, I did some research on our record when he's the referee as opposed to when he isn't. Let me clarify now that I took my data from the handbooks for each season. This restricted me to the 2012/13 onwards, so just six full seasons. This is because they only started naming the referee for each fixture from the 2013/14 handbook, which is the one that gives the data (team, results per competion) for the 2012/13 season.

A couple more points to make now is that any comparison between matches refereed by Dean and others in seasons earlier than 2012/13 hasn't been done because, as I said, the referee for each game only started being given in the 2013/14 handbook. Also I've only done the comparison for Premier League games, not cup matches. The reason for this is that the standard of the opposition is, I would suggest, much more variable in the cups, to an even greater extent than in the Premier League.

However, I have used the fixture lists in programmes this season to make it as up to date as possible. So therefore the figures below cover the full Premier League campaigns for 2012/13 through to 2017/18, and the first 25 games of 2018/19.

Over that period, a total of 253 Premier League games, in the 21 matches refereed by Dean Arsenal have won 38 points, an average of 1.81 points per game. Over the same period, in the 232 matches not refereed by Dean, Arsenal have won a total of 445 points, an average of 1.92 per game. On the face of it, this justifies the criticism aimed at Dean by many Arsenal fans.

But as I was doing this research, I noticed how many of Dean's Arsenal games were against the sides you listed Rich, which is the reason I'm doing this post as a reply to your one. Of the 21 Arsenal games refereed by Dean, 12 (57.14%) have been against the two Manchester clubs, Tottenham and Chelsea. Surprisingly Dean has not refereed a Premier League game between Arsenal and Liverpool since the end of the 2011/12 season.

Disregarding the Liverpool anomaly, games against the Manchester clubs, Tottenham and Chelsea represent 21.34% of Arsenal's 253 Premier League matches. But games against those four clubs represent 57.14% of Dean's Arsenal matches. That's more than two and two-thirds (2.68) more than would be expected had Dean refereed games against City, Man Utd, Tottenham and Chelsea at the rate I'd have expected. I assume that's explained by Dean being so experienced, so he generally gets more big games.

So of course Arsenal will win fewer points per game in Dean's matches than others. It would be very odd if that hadn't happened. I want to watch MOTD2 now so I'll get this posted. But my guess would be if one took account of the opposition, Arsenal do as well as can be expected in Dean's games. Maybe even a bit better.

Where Emery loses some leniency is when you see someone like Hasenhuttl go to Saints - a really poor team - and set them up with a definitive way of playing and immediately improving results, performances, energy and morale. Without £70m to spend.

I was one of many people who wanted to see a new manager take the same bunch of players wenger had and see what he could do with hem because the accusation was wenger wasn’t making them better players and wasn’t creating a team greater than the sum of its parts. The same accusation is starting to be thrown at Emery.

Today was a bit of a surrender- as was Anfield. Literally no answer. We couldn’t stop them creating or having shots and we couldn’t do anything of note ourselves. You see plenty of teams really frustrate big sides away by sitting in being ultra disciplined and restricting the home team to long shots and crosses.

Hi Bernard, I have seen that about mike dean and arsenal, that he has reffed more of our big games and us not being very good in big games mean there will be a correlation between Dean and arsenal defeats, I’m fine with that. The thing the result of games won’t show are the incidents within the game that could have affected the result.

I’m sure I saw something about Mike Deans penalty record for the giving pens to the other big teams vs arsenal. It was over a lot of games, 60 odd for each team (so maybe 10-12 years worth of games) and arsenal had something like 5 times more “games per pen” than the other clubs. It was maybe a pen every 4 games for all the others but a pen every 20 games for arsenal.

Having said that I don’t think refs are consciously biased for or against a certain team but I do feel too many are weak and subconsciously influenced by any number of factors including the home crowd, star players, a decision they’ve previously given, wanting to be seen, not wanting to be seen, not wanting to ‘ruin the game’ etc etc. Historically the biggest influenced of refs was certainly the aura Ferguson had around him - played off against foreign wenger and his band of cheating dirty foreign players

Dean doesn’t or didn’t do Liverpool games because he’s from the Wirral I think.

Guendouzi was great today. What he’s doing at 19 is fantastic. I thought he had a dip over Xmas, along with Torreira, but he’s back playing well again. Looking forward to him adding goals and assists to his game but it’s rare for a 19 year old CM to have that right now.

He should be a shoe in for young Player of the year if the award wasn’t bizarrely open to players up to 23 or so years old - which means Dterling should probably win. Although the media do love spurs so get your money of Harry winks

When we are mathematically out of the Top 4, I would like to see Emery experiment more with the youngsters. Blend them in for some games in preparation for the next season. Would he be that brave?

The Los Angeles Stan Kroenke Rams lost the Super Bowl. I am not sure how I feel about it because I hate the New England Patriots as much as I hate Tottenham.

What the Rams tells us that Kroenke can build a championship quaity side if he wants to. He committed all the resources the Rams needed to get to the championship. Coaching, staff, as well as building a state of the art stadium and complex in the works. I drove past it when I was in Los Angeles last April.

Hi Rich, thanks for your explanation of why Mike Dean hasn't done any of our league games against Liverpool over the research period. I just checked my notes this morning and he hasn't refereed any of our matches against Everton either. So him coming from Wirral must be the reason. Tranmere obviously haven't been in the Premier League, so they aren't an issue.

Morning Bernard, I think he did do a Merseyside derby recently. It’s the same as Anthony Taylor (I think) not doing Manchester games but I’m pretty sure he did the manc derby as Altringham is his declared supported team.

I’m sure I saw the list of what teams prem refs support once and it is a very odd list. I don’t think there was a big team amongst them

Perhaps Dean has stated that he is a Tranmere fan then?

MOTD said last night the premier league have said if VAR was at the city game the aguero hat trick goal wouldn’t have stood. It didn’t change the result but potentially gives more clarity on what handball is in the box

I think you’re right he is. Many roll their eyes when they know they’ve got mike dean as a ref, and I’m always worried but not because he’s a terrible ref more because he likes to be busy and involved, he won’t shy away from a big decision but that often leads to him making big decisions where there wasn’t one to be made. I’d take him over Jon Moss and Lee Mason for sure

Football 365 always seem to put the right analysis and perspective on things

Lee Dixon’s description of “comic-book defending” was a rather more precise way of putting it. Not only was Iwobi’s mistake critical, but Shkodran Mustafi was stood a good five or six yards behind every player: too far behind to block the cross, and too far to the right to head it clear.
Therein lies the problem: for all Emery can meticulously plan for any specific game or opponent, he will always be undermined by his own players for as long as he is unable to properly invest in this squad.
Many will place the burden of responsibility squarely on Emery’s shoulders for this defeat, yet the first goal was the product of two individual errors, the second would have been difficult for any defence to prevent, and the third had a great deal of fortune involved too.
When you consider that he is missing his first and second-choice right-backs and two of his three best centre-halves, there has to be a degree of sympathy. It just depends how much of that was eroded by the second-half showing.

I think Mustafi is one of those players who makes everyone around him worse. His brain farts are spectacular and if the ref had given a penalty for the tug on Aguero right after the first it would have been the straw that broke the camels back for him. There's a real lack of pace in that back 4 but also awareness

The Gooner is suggesting if we don't get top 4 Emery might be sacked.

https://www.onlinegooner.com/articles/view/4707

Really it wouldn't surprise me and I've said all season its like the england job the blokes on a hiding.

Even if the club let him stay on if we only have 40 million to spend the transformation everyone craves won't happen. His contract is due at the end of next season anyway

After my own mini meltdown last week and in the cold light of reality, I have to have some sympathy for Emery. I mean whichever way we look at it, the injury list in that defence has been nothing short of chronic and I'd be surprised if anyone in the league has had worse. Do wonder if it has something to do with the apparently rigourous new training methods and maybe pushed some too far. I mean even Mustafi seemed to be improving earlier in the season. Attack is pretty decent so really don't know why loans weren't being chased in defence rather than mid. Özil seems to be on an exit path so maybe theyre thinking about Suarez as something more than a loan.

With a few less injuries I do wonder whether the defence would still be a calamitous as it is right now.

I think losing Bellerin, Holding and sokratis at the same time was a big blow any manager would struggle with.

The area Emery deserves to be criticised on is his recent team selections, for goodness sake drop playing 5 defenders, bring Özil back into the side at least until summer when he can be sold and try and use Mustafi and Xhaka as little as possible. I know Özil put in a bad performance againest palace and then we started dropping him but that’s when the wheels started to come off.