Try as I might, sometimes I just don’t understand Arsene Wenger.

The FA Cup final beckons. He sees Chelsea have shipped seven goals in their last two games. He leaves our latest acquisition, arguably our best player, and certainly the most unknown to the opposition, on the bench. Why oh why, did Arshavin not start?

He has seen Liverpool take the game to Chelsea and so nearly win and – much as he (and we) may have despised the way they did it – he will have seen Bolton score three in a 15 minute spell and nearly get a fourth. How did they do it? By attacking and taking the game to Chelsea, something which – it seemed to me watching over broadband from my sickbed – Arsenal singularly failed to do!

Having made the (understandable) decision to match Chelsea with three in the middle, why didn’t he match them with two proper wide players? RvP is fine in a 4-4-1-1, but he was playing in too free a role, meaning Fabregas had no room to play. And we had no proper balance on the left. Fabregas, moreover, was crowded out not just by RvP coming deep, but by having Diaby alongside him. I thought Diaby played quite well in patches, but he and Fabregas are just too offensive and don’t complement each other. Song (who has played far better than Denilson or the invariably injured Diaby in recent weeks) and Denilson alongside Fabregas, with two proper wide players, would have given us much better balance.

But for all these faults, we are at 1-1 and Wenger takes both RvP and Adebayor off. Sure, neither had played particularly well, although Ade did provide the pass for Gibbs’ cross for the goal. I have been critical of Adebayor many times this season, but he is our leading scorer. How many other managers would take off both their leading goal scorers at that stage of a semi final? Especially, taking Ade off with less than ten minutes on the clock. We could have got to penalties. Yes, penalties, with our two first choice penalty takers off the pitch. Sorry, Arsene that was utterly mystifying.

To win a game against top quality opposition, you need your most likely goal scorers and creators to be on the pitch at the same time. So why, having belatedly introduced Arshavin to the game, did both the main strikers come off?

The line-up Wenger picked didn’t work from the off and – as we have seen all too often – the substitutions made little or no difference. I have doubted all season whether he really knows what his best midfield line-up or structure should be. The semi final confirmed it. So Arsene, “all” we have to go for now is the Champions League; while this will absolve you from having to make a decision about how to integrate Arshavin in two games against Manure, you still have to make that crucial decision about the centre of midfield. How will you structure the side to give Cesc the chance to set up a victory in at least one of those games? Whatever you do, please don’t pick the same team structure as yesterday!

And one more thing; never mind lasagne. Make sure Manure have some dodgy paella a couple of days before they play us. The results will be impressive.