It can be baffling when professional footballers publish their suggestions on how their team can be improved. The Arsenal squad is no exception. All too often it’s those who need to do better themselves who are most vocal. Denilson urges ‘we must be tougher’. Yes you must. Bendtner amazes us by saying “I’m not world class yet”. It’s the “yet” that is amazing.

This week step up Andrey Arshavin, “We need to buy three or four top class, experienced players to win trophies”.

Well Andrey Sergeyevich, if you can tear yourself away from your activities as an online agony aunt, perhaps you should take a good long critical look in the mirror and ask yourself some searching questions:

Where have you been since your 45 minutes of fame at Anfield 11 months ago?
What happened to the world class player we bought?
How much effort are you putting in?

The Russian’s performance plumbed new depths when we needed him most. During the second half against West Ham last Saturday nine of our ten men worked their guts out. Arshavin was the glaring exception.

He seems to have two extreme options.
(i) His favourite is to limit himself strictly to one touch football. The ‘go get it Clichy and I’ll watch you run’ option. One of the joys of Arsenal is that we play a lot of one touch stuff but the other players recognise that two, three or more touches are sometimes preferable.

(ii) Andrey’s alternative is at the opposite absurd extreme. Keep the ball, dribble past opponents, ignore team-mates and either shoot over the bar or loose the ball and then stand in an offside position for a while, puffing, doubled over with hands on thighs.

Yes Andrey, we do need experienced top class players to win silverware… you are one. So stop bleating and play like one.