Losing to Sunderland was a little surprising, losing to Chelsea at the Emirates is getting too damn close to being a habit. Of course it means that we now have to beat them at Stamford Bridge for the plot to play out like last season.

What are the chances? Well frankly who the heck knows. If you want to be Nostradamus then go ahead, but this team is playing with my mind big time. It is astonishingly clear that we have talent in abundance, despite some of the predictable "X is not good enough to play for Arsenal" and should be shot/sold/rendered into glue (delete where applicable) being published. What I do agree with is that we seemingly have a bunch of Mini Me's with not a lot to differentiate them. I have not been of the opinion that this is necessarily a problem. But having seen us being well beaten at home for the second season running, it is abundantly clear that what we don't have is the beating of Chelsea, at least not without a big guy making a pest of himself up front to take the pressure off the midfield.

You could argue, and Drogba himself is quoted as saying, that the first goal was fortunate to have found the net, it could have gone virtually anywhere. However if you attack the ball and give it a go, then if you're in form like he is, you'll at least have a chance of scoring. Whether Arsene is right in that Drogba didn't do much else but score (not that I personally see that as a problem, mind), if you ain't there, you definitely won't score. Maybe something we might point out to our attackers. Were we denied an honest goal? Six of one, half dozen of the other really. If it had been up the other end I would have been incensed and ready to write to my Member of Parliament at the unfairness had it been given.

So let's try for some mitigating factors. The second goal, like the first, could have gone anywhere, Vermaelen did well to keep it down. Unfortunately. What other excuses can we drag up? Well a lot of our players are coming back from longish lay offs or serious injury and clearly were not at the races in terms of match fitness or alertness. We may have talent in depth, but in certain combinations it doesn't seem to have the capability to score goals. Taking Sunday as an example, Eduardo looked like his confidence is shot and badly needs to get a goal or two. Vela, though immensely talented, is too lightweight as he doesn't have the experience yet to counteract his lack of size. Arshavin is just Arshavin. Even if he wasn't in the deepest of despair right now, he tends to be brilliant in bite-sized chunks. Theo needs some more minutes under his belt and start to be either played in the centre or else Arsene needs to stop touting him as a central attacker.

As I mentioned last post, none of these players are used to the current formation and will need to play in it for a while to get used to it. Which kinda gives us a problem if we continue with 4-3-3. If we can't push an attacker up field more, there won't be enough room in the midfield for Cesc to be magical and get forward himself. That I think is the value of RvP as much as anything else. The opposition defence were always looking to see what he was doing, particularly as he had began to get more clinical and tended not to take up as advanced positions as they might with say Eduardo. Eduardo can be clinical, but tends to need to be a lot closer to the goal to cause problems. He can also be dictated to by the opposition defence, whereas RvP isn't. Had Bendtner been available, then he would have created the same tension in their defenders, but he wasn't, so he didn't.

Is our season over? Only in the minds of the glummest of Gooners and the 'told you so' pundits. I'm not sure I can make a realistic case for us to win the Premiership that I can believe in myself, but the season is about more than that and cup competitions offer the one-off performance that we can do. It's the consistency we can't. But I'm glad to see that the players are at least saying they are well upset and have to play better. Let's hope words are converted to actions, and soon.