We gotta take our licks this morning, boys and girls, because we’re out of the League Cup to a team who are down there in League Two currently fighting off a relly scrap.

That’s the media narrative that will be peddled today and, if we’re honest, sometimes you just have to accept it. Like Chester from The Simpsons once said:

That’s a paddlin’

NOw, of course we didn’t actually take a paddlin’, we should really have dished one out. But when you are the Champions, when you’ve just come back from the Allianz Arena and been the better team against Bayern, followed that up by swatting aside a very capable Everton team in the Premier League, anything else other than a comprehensive victory against the calibre of opposition (with all due respect) that we faced yesterday, then yeah, “A Paddlin'” is what we’re going to get today. Rival fans, the media, most of the internet – most people who aren’t stakeholders with Arsenal connections is going to be after us today. We’re the champions, and when you are, you have a target on your head bigger than any other team – even the ones that cheat.

So yeah, today is going to be one to probably avoid the mainstream media for me, because the hyperbole pitchforks will be out in force.

The reality of the situation is that we’re out of a competition that we probably could do with being out of anyway. It’s four of four in terms of priority, and if you include the Community Shield, it’s only a little bit more of a step up in prestige. If Arsenal won just that, we’re not doing an open-top bus parade. You don’t get a lot of money for winning it (£100k), so the reality of the situation is that further down the line, we’re probably glad to be out of it and have some midweeks spare for the team to have a week off. The fact that Arteta busted out O’Neill for a League debut showed how much he wanted to avoid playing any of his main stars if he possibly could, but by the end of the game it was certainly a more experienced side. So it’s not like we played the kids for the full 90.

I was surprised about Meslier starting, but I guess the thinking Arteta probably had was that the opponent in question was probably such that if you’re going to give him just one appearance this season, that’s probably it. Kepa will most likely play in the FA Cup games, and Meslier needs to at least get his chance in one match this season. Unfortunately for him, in that one match, he basically had nothing to do other than pick the ball out of the net, although the way he conceded – through the legs – does make me wonder if a better ‘keeper would have fared better.

But he didn’t; we didn’t. Fleetwood scored with basically their only shot all night, and it became a training ground exercise of attack versus defence.

Unfortunately for us, our attack was found extremely, and sorely, lacking in quality. I was pleased for Big Vik that he bundled in the scrappiest of scrappy finishes to draw us level, but that was about it for us on a night in which chance after chance was squandered, and if Arteta and his Arsenal team aren’t looking at that January window and thinking about bolstering this front line, then they’re not doing their jobs properly. Because it was pretty bad stuff. One chance that comes to mind was a cross into the box that Havertz got on the end of with a header. It wasn’t really that much behind him; it was a good height for him to angle his head properly. It should have at least hit the target. But I have this saying: when a player delivers a shocking header off target, they have a “50p head” because the angle at which the ball comes off just looks like they’ve got a hexagonal head. That was what happened to Havertz in that moment, but it happened to him all game, because he was utterly abysmal.

And almost to a man, the Arsenal players out there last night were utterly abysmal. You’d like to give the kids a break; they probably should, but Salmon was clearly hooked at halftime because it was his mistake that gave Fleetwood their only real chance. On the flanks, I thought O’Neill looked lively but ineffective, which is going to happen if you’re a kid in a disjointed team that hasn’t played together. That Arsenal team certainly looked like that. Aside from many of the half-chances we never took, sometimes the passing was wayward too, and don’t get me started on the walking-pace football. It drives me nuts. If you’re one-goal down, you should never be having four or five touches and walking the ball forward. You should have an urgency from minute one after you’ve conceded. Yet at the back, we did that thing where we just walk the ball forward. Against a team that has got their goal, who know they are going to defend all night, you can’t just let them settle into a back 10 – you’re not going to get through- and yet that’s exactly what we let them do. And that made it harder for us.

In the second half we were better thanks to the introduction of Odegaard and White, but the forward line and attacking players continued to misfire and look generally quite crap. Havertz had a number of chances, Gyokeres didn’t really do much, and then Max Dowman was finding it difficult too. And so to his sending off. This was a tough one to take, because in real time I thought, “he’s kicked out, he’s off,” and the referee duly obliged. But having seen the replay, I’m sorry, but that’s not a red. There was no ‘violence’ in the ‘violent conduct’ part of the sending off. In fact, there was more violence and intent to literally ‘make a mark’ on a player by the Fleetwood defender. And no amount of ‘he got the ball’ makes the aggression at which he went in on a 16-year-old acceptable. Arteta wouldn’t be drawn on what he said afterwards to Max, but as he walked past him and into the tunnel during the game, Arteta had a face of thunder. I suspect after he looks at the replays he’ll be a little more understanding. The defender was reckless and got away with sending another player off and not himself by the fact that he was lucky to get a it of the ball.

And that’s it, really, for our involvement in this wretched competition for another year. We suck at the League Cup. We have for literal decades. So this one will be easier to get over. But as I said right at the top of the blog, we just have to take what’s coming to us and look ahead to a really tough game at Anfield on Sunday.

Back tomorrow as we start to look at that one.