I hate criticising Arsenal and Arsene Wenger despite my piece after the shambles of last Wednesday night because I love Arsenal and I love going to Arsenal home and away. And I am going to criticise, because the players and management ought to be absolutely ashamed of the performance at Stoke on Saturday.

Like the thousands of other supporters that were there, I gave up a whole Saturday to stand in the freezing cold and watch quite possibly the most disinterested bunch of players I have ever seen pull on the Arsenal shirt.

The sad part was, I expected to lose because I had no confidence whatsoever in the defence to deal with the Rory Delap throw-ins. And lo and behold what happened on the first throw? Defensive ineptitude and incompetence. After that, we never got close.

I do not for one moment accept Wenger’s excuse that we were tired because he made so many changes from the Spurs game!! So now he’s either lost the plot or he’s just blatantly lying. From the moment I worked out the midfield I could sense it was going to be a disaster. Denilson, as I’ve said before is quite simply not up to it. The first time I realised he was playing was when he got substituted. Song and Diaby ran around like two classless plonkers contributing absolutely nothing to the game. Walcott and Nasri, superb against Tottenham paid the price by being dropped. Genius. Not. What did Adebayor and Bendtner do? Nothing. What did Van Persie do? Like a p***k get himself sent off. I don’t care about Adebayor’s injury right now. He was a useless t*sser in the time he was on the pitch.

What gets me the most is that quite clearly Wenger and the players had learnt absolutely f**k all from Wednesday night and it showed. And make no bones about it, we will get hammered by Man Utd if we play like that on Saturday. I hope we don’t but it could be embarrassing. The fans gave the players some pretty forceful feedback at both half-time and full-time and it was thoroughly deserved. The team need a new goalkeeper, centre half, battling central midfielder and a striker. The warning now is pretty obvious, carry on like this and we won’t finish in the top four. And that would be a real disaster.