I’m sitting here a little over 24 hours after the defeat to Villa, and I’ve no desire to repeat myself and bang on about the same stuff I and so many others have been saying all season. So before I continue, I am going to have a look at what Arsene Wenger said after Saturday’s game, something I’ve not been able to do due so far for a number of reasons.

Ok, taken from arsenal.com, the following…

“The performance was not good but it was the kind of game where you can win 1-0.” True. But you know what – whereas past Wenger teams would have played badly and won 1-0, in 2008, with Villa attacking, it felt like a matter of waiting for them to score the first goal. There was not enough resistance or pressure on Villa when they had the ball. And Arsenal don’t keep clean sheets very often these days, even in the games they win. So 1-0 is a rare scoreline.

“Top level performance is consistency. At the moment we are not consistent enough to produce that kind of performance week-in week-out.” Basically, you can abbreviate this to Arsenal are not top level. How have things been allowed to decline to this?

“You have to accept that the game is played by human beings and sometimes physically they have a drop. It is very difficult for us to have a rational explanation about what happened today. I believe that the team want it but it was just like a few other times this year where it is unexplainable why we don’t really play at our 100% potential.” I’ll explain it to you then Arsene – this group of players aren’t good enough. Individually, you have some good players. Collectively, they are a mess. When things are going well, it all looks good. When they aren’t, you find out about the character of your players. There are a number of factors – lack of leaders, arrogance and complacency brought about by the manager’s selection policy, high wages and many of the players believing the claptrap the manager espouses about how good they are. Many need to earn their stripes, but act like they already have them. That bluff is easily called.

“I don’t believe that you can speak about champions or not champions. If you want to be champions you want to be consistent and at the moment we are not.” I’ll translate this one. We are not consistent enough to seriously challenge for the title, but if I admitted that six weeks before Christmas, it would make me look like a man who didn’t know what he was doing by investing his faith in this group of players.

“When we made the changes it was 0-0 and we lost 0-2. You can make all kinds of explanations but as a team we were not sharp” Well, the formation switched from 4-5-1 to 4-4-2. But Denilson had performed worse than Diaby up to that point and was not offering a great deal defensively, so leaving Diaby on instead of Denilson might have aided Arsenal’s attacking threat. But, in truth, what the f**k were we doing playing 4-5-1 at home to Villa, a team we should surely have greater aspirations of beating. Quite simply, Carlos Vela should have started alongside Bendtner with either of Denilson or Diaby on the bench. The hone side showed Villa too much respect from the first whistle and they didn’t need a second invitation to attack with confidence.

“Yes we had a very young midfield but we played against more experienced midfielders. Any midfield in the league is more experienced than ours but it doesn’t stop us from dominating them.” To dominate an opposition midfield, playing five in the middle is all well and good if more than two accurate passes can be strung together. Didn’t happen much on Saturday.

“It is too early (to speculate about transfers in January). We are mid-November. We have to see where we are at the end of December. Anyway at the moment to speculate about transfers it won’t help.” I don’t care about speculation, but I hope there is some serious activity behind the scenes to secure the players the club should have pulled out the stops to attain last summer.

Enough of Wenger’s words. Arsenal have put in poor performances every season under the current manager. What’s different now is that the team – due to their relative inexperience – is low on self-belief. Few have endured such a spell with so many defeats to average sides. In the past, you’d get the odd one, but not the number we’ve seen so far this season in three months.

There was booing at the end of the game from the home fans, at least those that had remained in their seats until the end. I don’t think this is a particularly healthy way of expressing your support for the team, but I can understand it. People pay a lot of money to fund the wages of the manager and the players and they can accept defeats if they think the players have put in serious effort to win a game. There was little evidence of that on Saturday. The team is flat, and the team is tired. And it’s only November. There is no justifiable excuse for the fatigue they are feeling. They’ve had a week off since beating Manchester United.

Critically, the team did not have the wit and imagination to break down an organized defence. Martin O’Neill attended the match at the Britannia Stadium when Rory Delap’s throw-ins were enough to beat Arsenal. He sat a few empty seats along from Ken Friar and Danny Fiszman in the section of the directors box reserved for Arsenal’s officials. He would have seen how easy it was to stop Arsenal playing. Basically, work hard and get enough bodies on the edge of the box to cut out the one-twos. They will rarely use width, and rarely shoot from distance. They are utterly predictable.

The paying public deserve better than this. And – aside from their booing at the end of the Villa game – many voted with their feet and left early. Soon they will be voting with their wallets. All because the manager chose not to strengthen the quality of his squad in the summer. And because the manager is stubborn and will not employ the coaching expertise the younger players are crying out for. The squad is in worse condition than it was a year ago. That isn’t progress.

Where does Wenger go from here? Well, he has to look at some of the brighter of his Carling Cup team and start giving one or two of them a start on a regular basis. If they do better than the present incumbents, then give them a run in the first team. This is how Ashley Cole came through and whatever you think of him these days, he was a vital component of the team that won five trophies in four years. That Cole only got his break by accident rather than design makes you wonder how many other potentially decent players have slipped through the net.

The manager also has to seriously look at the real potential of his established first team players and decide if he can do better by some wheeling and dealing in the transfer market. January is only going to allow enough surgery to ensure the team will have a shot at the Champions League qualifying rounds in August. But he has to be looking at next summer and swallow his pride to buy players that are too old to mould. Established professionals who will not wilt when things aren’t going well.

Wenger deserves the opportunity to put things right, so I’m not calling for his head. But the first step towards turning things around is realizing he has got it horribly wrong. Pride comes before a fall. Wenger will never admit his experiment has failed, but his actions in the two 2009 transfer windows will hopefully tell us that he’s admitted it to himself.

To finish on a light-hearted note, a glorious typo on the Telegraph review of the match, which according to John Ley took place on “an unseasonably barmy north London afternoon”. Unintentional? Maybe. Inaccurate? Not so sure.