I thought I'd do a good news, bad news piece, but you have to have some good news to do one of those. I suppose if you are looking for a crumb of comfort, it is that having such a wake up call so early in the season is 'way more beneficial that squeezing through and not having the profound weaknesses in our current squad highlighted. Small comfort though.

Since Ade has come out and said this was a warning against complacency, we have to suppose that we were complacent. Regrettably that's something I think we can all recognise from last year as well. It's a very fine line between giving a bunch of young players sufficient confidence in their own ability to be able to compete at the highest level, and instilling enough realism to make sure they don't think they just have to turn up to bag three points. Maybe Arsene errs on the side of the former, and the easy win last season wouldn't have set off any warning bells either.

So in a game of many concerns, what were the most obvious? Starting with the attack, you have to say we barely had one. I don't know what is going on with RVP, but he was shooting like he had the wrong size boots on or something. If you hadn't seen some of his free-kicks from previous seasons, you'd wonder why he had the job to take them. And whilst he didn't exactly get good service, he didn't do a lot with the chances he did get. If he hadn't scored mid-week for Holland, I'd think he was rusty or something. Ade was pretty much Ade, we all know he is going to need four chances before he actually looks like scoring, and to be honest I don't think he got that many in the whole match. When the highlight of the game is him hitting the post with a header, you have to ask why we didn't try it more often.

Our midfield didn't seem to be on the pitch at times, OK they were overrun numerically but I can't recall seeing so many passes go to the opposition without them needing to tackle. In truth Eboue did try and was subject to an outrageous tackle, but Denilson needed to be a mini-me Cesc and most certainly wasn't. We lacked cohesion and were drawn all over the place such that it was hard to tell who was supposed to be playing where at times. More positional discipline please.

Enough has been said about the goal. It should never have happened and we all know who was culpable. The worrying thing is you can see it happening again and again this season.

What is as concerning is that Arsene has now come out and said that buying is not always the solution. It's one I'd quite like him to try whilst it's still an option. I posted that one had to conclude that we didn't have the cash to buy a little while ago, and Arsene came out and said we most definitely did a day later. I'll assume he's telling the truth as I don't read him as a bare-faced liar, but I so don't understand how he can be thinking at the moment. If he really is confident we have enough depth to not have to necessarily buy, how does he explain Saturday? True he says in effect he doesn't yet know why it happened, but the suspicion remains that it could be we are not (yet) good enough. Thing is this is not a depth issue, we are talking about first team, pick every match players. He can be confident in his young players if he likes, but going into the fourth season since we won anything it really has to be better than that, we have to be seeing results. So if, and it is still if, we continue playing like a mid-table club, care to guess where we'll end up?

To dismiss our season after two games would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but the way in which we are playing is the worrying thing. We need a Flamster replacement this week, or we will continue to lose against teams we should beat. Not good enough for a team with Prem and CL ambitions. This weekend I experienced what it must be like to be a Spuds fan, and that's a painful, dark place. I don't want to go there again.