Watching West Brom tonight makes you wonder how on earth they managed to put 5 past Chelsea.

Another peach of a cross by Saka, following a good quick break.

Never mind a yellow, that elbow in the face should have been a red.

Hopefully it's coming but it is Dein on VAR

*%^@.

Why does Gabriel back off AND then let him inside on his stronger foot???

Would that be David Dein?

You'd think after making that pile on his shares he wouldn't need the work.

Bloody hell, that was close. We need another goal here or we're going to blow it.

Hanging on aren’t we?

We are a bit. Mind you, the way things have been going it's not much of a surprise.

Ceballos off. Crap performance and still couldn’t score in a brothel

We are mostly like a footballing equivalent of painting by numbers.

Still v little sign of Pépé wising up to the ways of the Premiership. He needs to strengthen up. A lot.

Shows the state of the team that we started with a central midfield of a guy who isn’t our player and shouldn’t be our player next year, and a guy we decided (rightly) 2 years ago wasn’t good enough for us and somehow we find him back with us simply as a warm body to fill a gap in the squad.
Add in a gk who allegedly quite fancied moving on, a right back who has never been anywhere close to being a first choice for us, and a left winger who is being paid £200k a week and his form has dropped off a cliff as soon as he joined us.

We are all over the place at the moment.

Ha ha. A Willian goal. From a free kick that he won.

Wow. Willian has scored.

Well, well, well.

Willian finally scores!

Fat Sam not looking impressed.

Sorry; Will, Will, Will.

3 points but not exactly inspiring stuff.

Willian redeems his entire season by relegating Sam Allardyce. Great signing.

The greatest satisfaction from this game is being the team that relegated Fat Sam. The man who prides himself on never having been relegated, he’s been sacked by relegated teams before they actually got relegated. We can rank this one alongside relegating Troy Deeney on the last day of last year.

and we finally win a home game, at last.

Until we get better midfielders I genuinely don’t think we will improve one iota.

Xhaka, El Nenny are just unable to play on the half turn, ceballos can but is useless at everything else.

We need a no8 & no10 and a player who can sit on the bench and cover both positions adequately in case of an injury.

We are unable to increase the tempo of our play because our distribution from midfield is shocking. It’s not a deliberate tactic, no *%^@** would ask a team to play like that.

Soumare’s transfer to Leicester is on, under £30m. Adding him to Ndidi and Tielemans is a hugely strong central midfield absolutely primed for the English league. Physical and pace with technique and ability to play and pass at high tempo.
That trip is a better central midfield than Man U’s as well I’d say. Any one of those 3 would start for us.

We need 2 central midfielders in the summer. Some physicality who can travel with the ball and we somehow need to up the technical ability in the side to help us control games. A fabregas/Cazorla type player. In terms of just basic skill with a football (first touch, control, passing etc) we don’t have anyone remotely close to that level, and we’ve actually got too many players whose basic technique is actually quite lacking.

Decided to give the game a miss. Sounds like a bore of a match, bar the goals.

Arteta’s interviews are just self serving nonsense that are applauded by the ‘keep Arteta’ crowd. He is like a dodgy fraudster. It is everyone else’s fault. Strangely Emery was one penalty away from a CL position. But the team since Arteta has taken over has gone further down the table despite his buys and decisions. The moment he picked Willian for this game said it all. Maybe after 16 months someone can tell me what formation he wants to play, because it is pointless buying any players if we don’t know how they fit in.

Disappointed we won again clearly. No hand gel for you last night. At the end of the day Willian scored why lose the plot because he was picked it made sense to give others a rest and he scored.

Oh and the stuff about transfers ? Arteta wasn’t even responsible for transfers until last summer as he was only head coach not manager and that changed in September at which point Willian was complete already and Partey was well inflight. Blaming him for our recruitment is a little unfair.

The formation ? Clearly you don’t actually watch our games because anyone can see he plays a fluid 4-2-1-3 that changes shape in possession. Occasionally a 3-4-3

You don’t know or seem to understand anything about Arsenal and don’t get any enjoyment from us. You need a new hobby, can I suggest bowls

I have a friend from London, supports a non London club. Met him in the states. He said the only London fans who are more entitled and spoilt than Arsenal fans are Chelsea fans. And he said Chelsea fans beat us out because of the money and bought trophies they got since 2004.

Not talking to anyone specific on here, just a friend's observation.

Hi Rich,

Which begs the question as to why we are not all over the Soumare deal. Perfect age, ability, physicality, potential and price for a club, like us, who cannot dine at the top table anymore.

I was waiting for a reply from Mr Mediocrity and here he is. I know that all the Arteta keepers are starting to say he was not responsible for transfers but he was in the media saying we must get Willian so don’t start with blame shifting. He wouldn’t have played him if he didn’t want him. As for the formation you are having a laugh. It was just a couple of months ago we were pumping crossed into the box, then we played false 9’s, of course most of the season Aubameyang was a left winger and the current sorry performances have 4 up front and no midfield. The only one with his hand in it is you with a photo of Arteta. I want our club to succeed but you obviously are happy with the default setting of mediocrity. I suggest you start supporting a club like Spurs, you are well suited.

The false 9 was only played through injury and on 2 occasions. The rest as I said. 2 pivots, 1 central and wingers and striker.

As for the rest of the nonsense all I’ll say is I’ve followed the boys all over Europe and season ticket holder and can draw on my experience of what I’ve seen of following arsenal rather than being an internet weirdo trying to force their opinions on others to feel relevant.

It’s perfectly logical to think that Arteta has done some things badly but has also to deal with some of the most mitigating circumstances ever for any manager.

When Martinelli first burst onto the scene, scoring wondergoals etc, I thought we might have unearthed our own potential superstar, as unlikely as that might have seemed given his £6m price tag. I so much wanted him to be that kind of player.

However, since his return from injury (and even a little bit before that to be honest) I have begun to think that may have been a little bit of wishful thinking. He has an amazing work ethic and infectious enthusiasm but I think he's probably not going to reach the stratospheric levels we all hoped for. I have been wanting him to be given more chances all season just hoping that I was wrong to harbour those niggling doubts and that he would reignite my early belief that he could become a very special player.

The Newcastle game apart he has largely been pretty average and yesterday he looked totally out of his depth at CF. Hopefully, that may have been partly down to a lack of the right kind of service but Arteta had little choice but to withdraw him as he was really quite poor. I am really sad to be saying this because I love his attitude and honestly hoped we had a potential worldbeater on our hands. My gut feel, though, is that he may well have a very good career at Arsenal but perhaps not the stellar career we all hoped he might.

I hope I'm wrong, he's still young and plenty of players don't really see their careers take off until their early 20s so fingers crossed that this season is just a blip.

I think he will be a decent player but he’s a bit of a dog chasing cars if you know what I mean and has to try and play the game in his head a bit more. His injury seems to have slowed him down a bit.

Also we have massive over expectation from our fans now on him as they wished to believe the solution to our problems was sat on our bench rather than in our 11 than accept the reality of our predicament that there is no magic solution here pre packaged we were ignoring.

Watching Ceballos and Elneny look like they were running through treacle as they tried to catch Pereira as he ran through to score was painful viewing. Neither should be at the club next year.

For all our lack of decent attacking output this year I do feel if we crafted a proper central midfield and a pair of high quality, technically adept full backs we'd be so much better. It would allow us to keep the ball better, be more on the front foot and move our play 20 yards up the pitch..

For the top teams full-back is such an important position in the game. Their defensive work is mainly about recovery pace and defending 1v1, but going forward they need to have the technical ability, passing range and spatial awareness of a central midfielder and also be able to play like an old fashioned winger.

This is what Trent and Robertson do for Liverpool - even if their form has dipped this year, and the best in the league this season has been Walker and Cancelo at City

I always have the feeling with Arsenal transfers, no matter who is in charge that we identify the player through lots of hard work and scouting etc and then we either haggle too hard over price or we worry about 1 perceived weakness and wait too long and someone else just bites the bullet and goes for it. I bet Arsenal think Soumare is too raw to play central midfield in the prem - but isn't that exactly what we need right now. Players considered too raw can be coached to iron out those rough edges, and at 22 there will be rough edges, but if you coach them well then you have a bargain. We can't afford finished product.

2 midfielders who clearly should be playing for championship sides not Arsenal.

Damn you Arteta you should be getting more out these world beaters !,,,,