We can relax now. The tension’s gone, along with any real hopes of the title. Arsene Wenger ventured that the Premier League could be won with 82 points, an idea I never considered a genuine possibility. Arsenal can get a maximum of 83 points now. As a monkey left in a room with a typewriter will eventually reproduce Shakespeare, so at some stage Spurs were going to beat Arsenal in a league game for the first time in the current millennium.

An email from one time contributor Marc Le Blanc, watching the game in South America, came in with the subject ‘Truly awful’. The message – ‘The word 'abject' doesn't even do tonight's performance justice. No excuses. The squad is full of passionless ingrates. Thankfully two Argentine technicians have cut the TV signal off at 76'.

He missed Arsenal’s best spell, which coincided with Robin van Persie hitting his stride, but his point was valid. Arsenal enjoyed huge amounts of possession in the two thirds of the field from which they were never going to hurt their hosts, but were pretty poor in and around the Spurs box. Granted the opposition established a thicket of bodies to protect their goal, but Wenger’s team did not have the quality or imagination to outwit them. A stat shortly before Van Persie came on revealed nine attempts at goal with only one on target. So when hard fought opportunities were forged, the finishing was woeful.

Van Persie’s entrance did raise the question of what might have been had he remained fit this season, but for whatever reason, the bottom line is that he is a player who has never gone through a campaign without suffering a significant absence through injury and so cannot be relied upon to give you over 30 league appearances.

Certainly, the treatment table has been fairly unforgiving over the course of the season, and the manager can and will argue that under normal circumstances, his team might have garnered enough points to win the title. Ultimately though, in the cold light of day, that fact that in recent matches, they have needed injury time goals to see off teams as poor as Hull and Wolves, and were unable to beat a fairly average Birmingham team suggests that the team didn’t deserve to finish top of the pile. No-one would question the character shown by the players over recent weeks, but there are valid concerns about their quality.

Spurs’ first goal was a fluke. There is an argument that Almunia might have done better, but I don’t accept that. Plenty of top class continental keepers would have dealt with the clearance by punching the way he did, and he bumped into Sagna as he was trying to recover his position. It was a fantastic finish and an indicator that it was not going to be Arsenal’s night. The second goal however was simply unforgivable and an indicator of the defensive indiscipline that has cost the team so dearly this season. Sagna simply switched off mentally and Spurs scored when under normal circumstances, Bale would have been offside.

As the clock ticked down, I could feel the sands of time trickling away on this season’s title challenge. I felt if Arsenal could get one before 70 minutes were up they might have a chance of winning. But the goal, when it came, was too little too late. In fairness, Gomes in the Spurs goal gave an even better performance than that he did when playing for PSV against the Gunners in the Champions League in 2007, a game in which he looked so good, I though that Wenger should consider signing him. He was only really tested by Robin van Persie, but the lack of activity in the preceding 60 odd minutes had not made him rusty.

The manager will use Arsenal’s final points tally to argue that the team has improved this season and that his method is working. And certainly, given the quality of the players at his disposal, he has done well to keep an interest in the title going as long as mid-April. However, he also told shareholders at the October AGM that this season his team would win a trophy. He will call black white as long as it suits him. Judge me in May is I think the usual mantra we hear midway through the season when things don’t seem to be going very well. And when May comes he attempts to justify the outcome by stating the team haven’t done so badly after all, that they have made progress. Somehow I can’t see him agreeing to take part in the annual shareholders’ Q&A evening this May, an event I don’t think we’ll see again until he has won another trophy.

Arsenal lost six games last season, this time they have lost seven. They reached the last four in Europe a year ago, this time around the last eight. In the FA Cup, they made the semis in 2009, the fourth round this time out. Carling Cup quarter finals both seasons. However, they have won more league games this season, and should finish higher than fourth barring a freak set of results. Both seasons, the ultimate conclusion must be that they were not good enough to win a trophy, or at least, either of the two competitions the manager gives any credibility to.

Arsene Wenger has done extremely well in his attempt to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but it’s never going to be quite enough. At some point, a club with a turnover of over £200m a year must start acting like it in the transfer market. If the manager is unable to realise that he might need to spend a little more than he would like to, then the club will continue to fall short, lacking quality in depth. Le Boss had money in January to purchase some quality know how. He chose to keep his chequebook in his pocket. Arsenal took one point from nine after exiting the FA Cup, a game which saw him resting key players for the very Premier League matches they performed so poorly in.

There were hopes this team could win the title, I even believed it was possible myself early in the season when the team seemed to be working so much harder off the ball. But ultimately, quality will out when it comes to the final league table. And there are other sides with more of it than Arsenal. Here’s another email just in as I write, from Shane Casey, titled ‘Two World Class Players’. It reads, ‘Van Persie and Campbell, no one else. Very, very average team and Wenger must take the blame... whole season has been a fluke’.

The manager has placed faith in players he has brought to the club young and kept together, but most of these lads don’t know how to win trophies because they are not surrounded by enough team-mates who can shown them how it’s done. Until that changes, chances are the silver polish isn’t going to need re-stocking at Ashburton Grove anytime soon.