Inevitable End

Again I find myself pleading for a sense of perspective.

The kids were always going to lose last night. Their best opportunity came in the very first minute, and had we put that away, the pressure would have probably got to them eventually - in any case, City's tremendous reserves of firepower would have certainly turned the game around.

They didn't do themselves as much harm as a 3-0 scoreline might suggest. Fabianski wasn't at fault for any of the goals, Ramsey was still a force to be reckoned with in midfield, and Rosicky was engineering some silky attacks. Vela worked hard up front - and probably did better than Eduardo would have on current form - and Merida was bustling about as always. Eastmond shielded the defence well in the first half, although his lack of strength became a problem.

My main concerns were that Wilshere was kept very quiet, that Traore just doesn't appear as defensively solid as we need him to be, and that Song was dodgy for much of the game. The latter may be excused as he has become more accustomed to the DM role, but he showed yet again that he is incapable of marking properly at set pieces, particularly when he gave Adebayor a free header which he could and should have put away easily. Silvestre actually had a fairly decent game, but he was entirely to blame for Wright-Phillips' goal - he simply ran backwards in a straight line, gawping at the winger's feet and looking like a Pro Evo defender with the analogue stick jammed.

I'm not for a moment saying that this had anything to do with City's win, because they had the game pretty much wrapped up by then, but Craig Bellamy should not have been on the pitch by the time he set up Weiss' goal. I'm getting sick and tired of opposition players bullying the referee against us, and let's not beat around the bush, Chris Hoy (remember that name?) simply bowed to his demands. He was constantly screaming at him; no one likes to see it, the FA included, and it's about time referees started booking players for it. People can say what they like about Arsenal players, but one thing that they don't do is harrass the referee, and they didn't deserve to receive six yellow cards. Admittedly Song was extremely lucky not to be sent off for his last man block, but perhaps this was just Hoy getting all mixed up again and trying to please everyone.

Bellamy has always been a nasty piece of work, and when he continued to yell at a silent Wilshere immediately after shaking his hand he summed up his level of professionalism.

Speaking of which, I am embarrassed that Wenger ignored Hughes at the end. It's a simple rule of courtesy, you just shake hands at the final whistle. If your opponent has done something absolutely heinous, fair enough, but Hughes didn't do anything wrong except for disagree with him a few times and stray into our side of the technical area once. If Arsene wasn't friends with Red Nose he would never have shaken hands with him after some of the crap he's had to deal with at Old Trafford.

As for our trophy hopes, let's not start squabbling again after being knocked out of the Carling Cup quarter finals. To reach this stage of the competition with a team consisting entirely of youth players and back-ups is a tremendous achievement, and if we had won it, fans would still be rubbishing it as a second-rate trophy and clamouring for some real success.

I'm still very optimistic about this season. We've had a bad run, and judging from past years this tends to be followed by a considerable improvement in the second half of the season. We're having terrible injury problems, and they can only get better... surely?

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