It’s difficult to point out where the problem with the current crop lies, if only because it lies in so many places. There’s a shocking lack of depth and/or confidence in some vital areas, holding midfielder and striker among them. Arteta has played every minute of every league game this season, and has felt an understandable pinch of exhaustion. We have to rely on Schrodinger’s Striker from the Coast of Ivory

I’m at an unedifying place with respect to my Arsenal fandom right now. Usually preferring to eschew froth-mouthed tribalism and hang around in the grey area of indifference as 140-character hand-grenades are lobbed hither and tither on Twitter, I entered the fray yesterday: taking out my troll willy and waving it in Chelsea’s direction after their 1-0 loss to Corinthians in the FIFA Club World Cup/Friendly Tournament In Hindsight. But like all trolls, my flashy feather dance hid an underlying sadness – sadness borne out of Arsenal playing like a bucket of platypus ejaculate.

Blogging from these online stables has been sparse of late, so I’ll have to paint all recent Arsenal performances with a lazy brush for brevity’s sake. Everton: spirited and lucky; Swansea: What is this I don’t even; Olympiakos: I want to frisk and frolic in Rosicky’s hair; West Brom: The world’s unfair, and it was unfair in our favour this time; Bradford: Thousands of woodpeckers circling my head, taking turns to extirpate parts of brain matter. There. Arsenal now travel to Reading, home to the side propping the league table up with their leaky defence and general lack of quality. Sadly, lack of opposition quality hasn’t stopped Arsenal from chucking points away.

Thing is, what I’m trying to say with this post is completely at odds with our up and down and down and down showing so far this season. What I’m trying to say is…December is there for the taking. In spite of all fluctuations in confidence, jadedness, and attacking impotence shown thus far, the next few fixtures represent a great chance to get back to a respectable position in the table and kick on in January. Reading, Wigan, West Ham, Newcastle, and Southampton is what the fixture list reads like before we travel up to Swansea for the FA Cup on the 6th of January. Earlier Arsenal teams would have gobbled this up without burping (and many of Arsene’s past iterations did exactly that). But this current bunch isn’t like Arsene’s earlier iterations.

It’s difficult to point out where the problem with the current crop lies, if only because it lies in so many places. There’s a shocking lack of depth and/or confidence in some vital areas, holding midfielder and striker among them. Arteta has played every minute of every league game this season, and has felt an understandable pinch of exhaustion. We have to rely on Schrodinger’s Striker from the Coast of Ivory if Giroud gets a niggle or needs rest. Podolski can theoretically play through the middle, but hasn’t really enamoured the senses when he’s been given the chance. Walcott can theoretically play through the middle, but is currently weighed down by colossal inkpots and bulky pens. Chamakh can theoretically play through the middle, but his personal confidence and the manager’s confidence in him both lie in tatters, with a January move surely needed to put everyone out of their misery.

Coupled with squad deficiencies, there’s a continuing propensity to underestimate the opposition that seems like an Arsenal endemic now, regardless of the personnel on the pitch. We come out expecting goals rather than working towards them; we wait for the other team to make mistakes rather than forcing them to make mistakes; we’re content in safe but ultimately craven sideways passing sans risks – and teams have warmed to this torn Arsenal blueprint and worked it to their advantage. The team playing against Swansea was a team scared to pull the trigger, a team tired to make runs in behind the defence, and a team that constantly passed up responsibility to each other. The Bradford fiasco was even more worrying: a full-strength team failing to muster up a shot on target till the 70th minute, Premier League virtuosos slipping and sliding against League Two dilettantes. To those that say Bradford were lucky: effort often engenders luck, and listlessness engenders misfortune.

In spite of all this, in spite of Arsenal being there for the taking, I still believe December is there for the taking. It’s odd for the squad to be this jaded before mid-season, but there’s nothing we can do about freshening things up before January (there’s nothing we will do in January as well, haha). We have this sleepy hodgepodge of arms and legs to rely on for the next fortnight, and they have to stop violating the snooze buttons on their alarms. There have been enough wake-up calls, Arsenal. Get on that fucking bus and go to school.