Hello there and welcome to a brand new R-Splug R-Scast right here on R-Splug.com.

I hope you're well. Well certainly better than you were yesterday morning. Having digested the sumptuous fair, which we were served up at Europe's top table on Wednesday night.

The defeat against Monaco opened up plenty of old wounds and we saw some very familiar failings from an arsenal side, who once again, at this stage of the competition, blew it.

In a big way, and this time we don't have the excuse of, well you know they're one of the best teams in the world. They're not. They're not a bad team, certainly defensively quite good. But they only scored four goals.

In the group stages, the score three against us, with half their players injured, a right back in central midfield, and a striker who makes Stephen Hawking look mobile. It was, it has to be said, pretty dismal stuff all in all. There wasn't anything really that you could take from that performance and use as a positive. Not a single thing. Not our midfield play, certainly not our attacking and certainly not our defending. And while rightly there has been a lot of focus on the way we defended at times it was like.

Watching an under 12's game or just a load of puppies chasing a ball around the place with no shape or discernible organization.

I think we also have to look at the other end of things the way we attacked that in the light of a defeat like this it's easy to overlook the fact that we did make chances in this game and didn't take them.

Because you look at the way we defended and that is what has you tearing your hair out and you think, you know, even if we don't score, at least we could defend better than that. But look at Danny Wellback in the first couple of minutes, he turned away from a defender quite brilliantly and then hoof to shot over the bar from close range.

At this level of football when you're in that position, you need to at the very least hit the target and from there you would expect your striker to score a goal. Olivier Giroo.

You know, the guy's been in fantastic form for us. He scored eight goals in his previous 11 games. He made three assists in that as well.

He was talking about how he was feeling confident, how he'd improved his game. So it's kind of typical that right after that he has a stinker of epic proportions and there's no other way to describe the performance other than it was just unbelievably bad.

A striker can miss a chance or he can do something wrong, but the chances that he missed and the way that he used the ball pretty much everything he did was terrible, absolutely terrible. I suppose the two best chances were the header in the second half and the one that he blasted over the bar after the Alexis Sean.

So you're looking there at three chances that are so really, really should have scored from Wellback and Giroo twice.

Now that doesn't excuse our bad defending, but when you defend badly and you attack badly, the game is usually only going to end up one way for you. And I thought as well that one of the key issues we had was like a proper balance in the team and we've seen this before whereby we've had an imbalanced back four

where perhaps Monriol is playing at center half where we've got chambers and murder sac are playing center half. It's not right the balance. And yesterday we had in central midfield, Santa Cazorla who I love, Cocoland struggled a little bit, but what we were missing was a more traditional central midfield player, someone like Aaron Ramsey, someone like Jack Wilshire.

I know that some people aren't terribly keen on make a lot of that, but I don't think that we would have been that disorganized with our teta on the pitch.

And over the last couple of games, you've looked at this arsenal side, look at palace the way we played then look at the way we played against Lester.

That we like to player in the middle of the park who could help us control the game, who could dictate the pace of the game.

It's brilliant putting out all those attacking players and it was beautiful to watch the way that we played against Middlesbrough, but that was Middlesbrough.

And this was Champions League football. And if it had clicked for us, people would be saying, wow, brilliant, this arsenal side have done it, but it didn't. And it never looked like it was going to.

A bright enough start to the game where we had that well-by chance and a couple of other little moments where we caused them danger and then after that they just dug in, we got slow and we got predictable.

And what was also predictable was our attitude to conceding a goal and even to conceding the second goal. It's a two-legged game.

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