All Foreplay, No Score-play

Those of you who've watched Arsenal this season, will have known the eventual outcome within 15 minutes of the start of yesterday's game against West Ham. It was the same old story. Arsenal created a glut of chances and didn't score. You wondered whether West Ham would pinch one off a counter-attack, and sure enough on the stroke of half-time they did. And then Arsenal continued to create a glut of chances but to no avail. SAME. OLD. STORY. One-nil not to the Arsenal.

There was all the intricate passing, pretty football, and scintillating build-up play and movement that you'd expect of Arsene Wenger's sides, but nothing at the end of it. To take Arjun's “just can't score” metaphor a step farther, this Arsenal team have all the foreplay imaginable, but when it comes down to getting the job done, they just can't raise themselves to the task. There's far too much fannying around, and the look completely impotent without their big guns. Excuse me for that series of puntences please. I just couldn't help myself.

The point is that Arsenal can't really find a goal from anywhere at the moment with Robin Van Persie and Thierry Henry both out for the rest of the season. Judging by his overall lack of mobility and effectiveness, Julio Baptista has proved to be more of an “immovable object” than an “unstoppable force” - talk about the biggest let down of the season.

Emmanuel Adebayor, is always a threat, but is not prolific, and can't be expected to shoulder the goalscoring burden alone for long periods. He does so much, so well, but needs people around him to finish. Aliadiere? Well he's quick, slippery, works hard and holds up the ball well, but has all the threat and accuracy of a water pistol. And that's about it.

It was a 3^rd straight league defeat, and things are becoming pretty serious now. They are 5 points behind Liverpool, and 3 ahead of Bolton, and barely clinging onto that last Champions League spot with a game in hand. The problem is that there is absolutely nothing to look forward to in terms of personnel, because everyone who could be fit right now is fit, they're just not good enough to score goals, and ultimately that is the basis of football. Wenger might wax lyrical about how Cesc, Hleb, Rosicky, Denilson and Freddie pass and move and dribble, and how unlucky Arsenal are to not be winning, but he's not fooling anyone. It's the old cliché of “goals win games”, except by having a team devoid of finishers, he's in a way responsible for them being unlucky. Some solution will have to be found to solve this problem for the remaining league games, then come the summertime, it's time for some investment.