While some of the suggestions of Arsenal's decline down the years have come across as sensationalist hyperbole, there is now a real air of abjection about the Emirates.
There is no shame in losing to Manchester City, but to do so in the manner that they did at the weekend - and in the Carabao Cup Final - has left some understandable questions. What's most cutting about these questions raised is that they go to the heart of what manager Arsene Wenger has always been perceived to be good at.
There was a time when, under the Frenchman, Arsenal were seen as the attacking avant garde. Even when the trophies dried up for a while, the Gunners could be counted upon as entertainers whose chief failing was a lack of pragmatism, who would invariably collapse at the very last like a ballerina in a stampede.
That now is a memory.
Arsenal are turgid going forward, and breaking the club record transfer fee twice in the space of six months has done nothing to restore the sort of verve that was so effortlessly achieved with comparatively middling footballers back in the noughties.
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