Don't panic, one bad result for Arsenal won't make or break season

Misfiring Gunner: Andrey Arshavin suffers last night
11 April 2012

And so we come out of the rabbit hole. During the last six days, a great slew of cup games has washed passed. And in passing they have added yet another layer of intrigue to a season that is already turning into a quiet little classic.

You may have thought the Premier League was engaging enough to keep your buttocks clenched between now and May. Not so. Flex that gluteus maximus! It's only going to get tenser.

Apologies from the off to Arsenal fans for the heady tone here. This may have been a magnificently entertaining extended cup weekend but I doubt there were many happy faces up in the red bit of north London last night. The magic of any sort of cup — be it Carling, FA or otherwise — is only worth celebrating when you're the one casting the spells.

And last night Arsenal were conjuring up the square root of bugger all. Their 1-0 defeat at Ipswich was a tied-on stinker. "Playing so many games you could see tonight that we had no spark," said Arsene Wenger, afterwards. And when he sees something, you know it positively, definitely happened.

Arsenal, alas, spent most of their 90 minutes at Portman Road hovering about three feet over the ordurous pit marked abject'. This was not a Manchester City of a performance, in which they threw everything at a bunch of bad-faith duffers in blue without finding something that stuck. It was not even a Leeds of a performance, in which they played within themselves, lacked punch, but got through the match thanks to tenacity and a little bit of gamesmanship.

No, it was a damp trump of a performance, sorry to say, in which Wenger's side trundled, laboured, fiddled and ultimately came away with nothing, undone by a goal of depressing simplicity, over the top, into the net. Whether Tamas Priskin was offside or whether he was not, Ipswich deserved their one-goal victory over the Gunners and Arsenal deserved to lose. They looked exhausted, undermanned and in dire need of putting their feet up.

But let this be not of total discomfort to Arsenal fans. Their team have been coming into their own this season. And while Wenger needs undoubtedly to add depth to his squad — certainly in central defence and possibly up front — there is more often than not a slick fluidity to his side's play that will prove too much for the majority of teams that they meet. They have tweaks to make, not wholesale changes.

And, of course, they are not alone in their toil.

This part of the season has been cruel to any number of teams. Take Liverpool, if you fancy a laugh. The parping of trumpets has sort of cracked up at Anfield, where the King is back but has spent the last two games trying to work out whether phlegmatic or bewildered ought to be his default face.

Or take Chelsea. They may have slippered Ipswich 7-0 on the weekend but one can hardly think that it heralds a return to the form they were showing at the beginning of the season, when it appeared that they might be the first side in Premier League history to spank more than five goals past everyone they came across.

Too much has happened behind the scenes since then. They remain in the FA Cup at least but the way things are going it could be their only chance of silverware this season.

And let's not forget Manchester City, the masters of the hubris-verse, whose combined riches could only amount to effect a 2-2 away draw at Leicester City in their weekend cup tie — a result that was all the more amusing given that it was eked out against a club led by their most rapacious former manager of all, Sven-Goran Eriksson. They may not be feeling too clever after their recent run of results, either.

None of these are bad teams and Arsenal can take solace in the fact that they may have lost
1-0 at Ipswich but they are probably in better shape than most of their potential rivals in the League or either of the cups. I would wager on them making at least one Wembley appearance this season and being in the title race in April.

All that, of course, is contingent on them coming through their next run — a set of three games that includes an FA Cup replay against Leeds and league matches against the bottom two. Sounds easy, but Wigan can be nuggety and West Ham terrifyingly unpredictable. The Gunners will need to raise their game for all three of the matches.

But if they do so, they will surely feel like they are in decent shape for the approach of spring.

Follow me on Twitter @dgjones

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