I may only be the tender age of 22 but I have been going to Arsenal since the age of six, from standing on the clock end terraces for the first time in the season of 1990/91, to becoming a bond holder (thanks Dad) in the North Bank upper in 1993 to then finally become a season ticket holder in Wenger’s first full season 1997/98 (not a bad year to become a season ticket holder!) So that’s 17 years of watching The Arsenal and my 9th year as a season ticket holder.

During these years I have often found myself falling into the group of fans who strongly believe in the conspiracy theory against The Arsenal that nobody likes us and as a result the FA and their referees are always biased against us. Nights, such as Newcastle at home when Mr Poll lost the plot and what would have been 50 unbeaten at Old Trafford until Mr Riley decided he had had enough of our success, spring to mind. I recall saying to my sister on the phone after that game “I have no objections to losing, it had to happen some day, but to be cheated out of our unbeaten record like that is a disgrace.” These of course are two of the most recent memories, but there were others before such as the Old Trafford brawl in 1990 when of course we just had to be deducted more points than United.

However, for the first time ever in my years as an Arsenal fan I have reached my limit of feeling sorry for ourselves, quite frankly I am tired of the excuses. Our two recent cup defeats at the hands of Chelsea and Blackburn have bought about the perfect smoke screen for Wenger to cover our failings of the season so far – which can quite simply be summed up as not being able to hit a cow’s ass with a banjo!

I fully accept our great manager’s point that we get booked more often than any other opponent which is infuriating while watching games, and I also accept that during 180 minutes of FA Cup football against Blackburn we should have had at least two penalties if not three. But in my view this is where the smoke screen starts. By Wenger using these two excuses, while also fighting the FA tooth and nail over our Carling Cup Final treatment, he is simply trying to hide the fact that we don’t score enough goals. As well as looking at the table of stats relating to number of fouls to number of bookings, we should also look at our number of shots to number of goals ratio – which just isn’t good enough.

Despite all this mistreatment of the FA we have still been able to create glorious chances in every game. Our captain himself admitted that he should have had a first half hat-trick away to Man City – we lost 1-0. CSKA Moscow at home in the Champions League was a case of 20 or 30 plus shots to the home team yet a 0-0 draw. More recently we have had Chelsea in the Carling Cup and Blackburn away in the FA Cup where Toure and Baptista have both missed free headers from six yards. And then to round it off in the space of four days we have seen Fabregas miss an open goal against Reading and Adebayor miss a one on one against PSV which would have put us 2-0 up on the night. And these are just the ones that spring to mind, there have been many more wasted chances along the way this season.

I guess what I am trying to say is that for all the bad refereeing in the world, for all the unfair yellow cards we pick up, and for all the penalties we have turned down we are still good enough to beat the opposition. I’m tired of the crowd shouting ‘shoot’, I’m tired of people asking for a plan B – it’s time to start executing plan A!!! It works time and time again, we continuously break teams down only to waste glorious chances and as a result finish the game with a last gasp win, a 1-1 draw or a narrow defeat when we should really have won by a country mile!

I recall, in both Wenger’s second double season and our unbeaten season, arriving at Highbury in expectation of a big win, two or three goals at the very least against the majority of opposition, and so often we delivered. I lost count of the number of times teams who came to Highbury to set their stall out but a fast start and ruthless finishing meant we were 2 or 3 nil up within the first 15 or 20 minutes. In one game against Sunderland I even recall being 3-0 up in five minutes! And it is about time that the current crop of Arsenal stars stood up and be counted. It is time for them to be remembered as the player who scored a winning goal as opposed to the player who missed yet another chance before we were sucker punched on the counter attack – and when this time comes we really will have a team capable of challenging again for the Title and the Champions League.

Well I’m glad I managed to get that off my chest as I’m sitting here at work scrutinising the exit against PSV – seeing over and over again in my head Ade miss his one on one, the Beast blaze over the bar along with Fabregas. I can’t help but feel these are just more wasted chances that other teams don’t miss, and if we were more ruthless we would have a trophy to our name and two more cups to play for.