I think one of the reasons I lost faith in Arteta a while ago is his attempts to explain away Arsenal’s attacking impotence. Like when they went through that strange period of walloping scores of aimless crosses into the box and we were told it’d work because ‘it’s pure maths.’

He’s pointing to missed chances again last night and there seems to be this assumption that every decent shot ‘deserves’ to be a goal or rued as bad luck. The vast, vast majority of shots don’t go in. The vast majority of chances are missed. Publicly he has never grasped that.

It just makes me think that he doesn’t have an answer to the fact that Arsenal’s build up is torturously slow and doesn’t stress opponents. Essentially, I think he’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes by talking to how good the chances were or how unlucky Arsenal are.

Wrapped up in all of this is my pop psychology assessment that he’s too wrapped up with projecting the image of a good coach and that he’s lost sight of the most important thing- winning games, which means taking lots of shots and scoring goals.

‘The process’ is supposed to be a means to the end. ‘The process’ is not the job in and of itself.