Team Focus: Same Old Problems Persist for Arsenal and Wenger

There was a moment in early February when even the most self-confident of football writers was beginning to wonder if they might have got Arsenal wrong this season. All logic said that they didn't have the depth of squad to maintain their challenge - quite apart from all the other doubts about their mettle when the pressure was really on and whether Arsène Wenger is still able to compete tactically with the very best - and yet they kept plodding on, dismissing the league's lesser sides with a ruthlessness that seemed out of character. When they beat Crystal Palace 2-0 at home on February 2, it was their sixth win in seven in the league and, although the fixture list was backloaded, it seemed possible that they might hold on and win the title.

They had a tough fortnight coming up, with games away against Liverpool and at home to Manchester United in the league, at home to Liverpool in the FA Cup and at home to Bayern Munich in the Champions League, but if they could just get through that, the thought ran, then who knew what might be possible?

What happened, of course, was that Arsenal conceded four goals in that first 20 minutes at Anfield, and their form abruptly collapsed. They went out of the Champions League and, although they got by Liverpool to reach the semi-final of the FA Cup, the defeat to them in the league was the beginning of a run of nine games in which they've picked up just nine points. Winning the title isn't mathematically impossible, but it feels emotionally and psychologically so, and the battle now is to hang on to fourth in the face of an unexpectedly emphatic challenge from Everton, whose victory over Arsenal on Sunday was their sixth in a row.

Injuries, of course, have played their part, and few sides could cope with being without players of the calibre of Aaron Ramsey, Theo Walcott, Mesut Özil, Laurent Koscielny, Kieran Gibbs and Abou Diaby simultaneously. Still, greater investment might have prevented them being quite so exposed.

The issue is particularly acute at centre-forward. Whether Olivier Giroud is good enough to lead the line for a team with aspirations of winning the title is debatable, but what is certain is that he has not been helped by being forced to carry on leading the line even after his form has collapsed. Of Arsenal's 24 games before the capitulation at Anfield, Giroud played 22 games, scored 10 goals and set up six. In his nine games since, he has scored three and set up one. His conversion rate has fallen from 14.1% to 11.6%, shots per game from 3.2 to 2.9, key passes from 1.1 to 0.6 and his Whoscred.com rating from 7.52 to 6.84.

That's not to blame Giroud: no other centre-forward at a top seven club has made as many as 31 Premier League starts, so a level of fatigue is to be expected, and his dip in form feels as much a symptom as a cause of the decline. It feels as though there's been a collective loss of belief. In every metric other than pass completion, Arsenal have suffered severe decline.

Goals scored per game are down from 1.96 per game to 1. Goals conceded are up from 0.88 to 2.11. Pass completion has remained roughly the same. They're having fewer shots and conceding more. Tackles are down by over 3 per game. Possession is down almost 2.5 percentage points.

There's a good argument that the title challenge was an illusion created by the fixture list: strangely it was only when they won 1-0 at Spurs four games ago that Arsenal had more points in equivalent games than they had last season. The shape of the season may have been different but essentially nothing much has changed: all the doubts about squad size and spending, and Wenger's inability to change the pattern of a game remain.

What do you think needs to change at Arsenal for them to become serious title challengers once again? Let us know in the comments below