If this close season were an egg-and-spoon race, then Wenger must feel that someone has robbed his spoon and tied his laces together before the starting pistol has even gone off.

The team fell short in the title race, and all of a sudden players are jumping ship. To put it mildly, it’s not what we need and to put it even more mildly, the press are enjoying it.

Flamini has left for more money, and now Hleb – who is keeping his own counsel, for the most part – seems determined to follow him out the door. Yesterday his agent spoke to the painful-sounding Belarussian newspaper Pressball.

“Alexander is preparing to make the most important moves of his life. He is leaving Arsenal even though they want to offer him a new long-term contract and better conditions. Only time will tell if leaving is the right decision, but there’s no way back now. Everything will be cleared up in the next two weeks.”

An Arsenal future for Hleb has been looking less and less likely for some time, and my gut feeling is he’s gone. I firmly believe that losing these two players, while a setback, is not a mortal blow – both are replaceable. Flamini had an excellent season but his circumstances were quite unusual; last close season he was a squad player and was told he could leave, but didn’t because there were no Milans sniffing at his door. So his contract remained in limbo and he ended up exploiting that. Hleb is extravagantly gifted but his Achilles Heel is that he is almost incapable of shooting at goal.

The real issue here is what does it do to the morale of the rest of the squad? Naturally, the gentlemen of the press eye a paper-selling story and they are keen to exploit the situation. No doubt they are keen to tell us that Adebayor and Fabregas are next.

Or that Arsenal are stingy, which I just don’t accept. We are the fourth most profitable football team in the world. We have a vast wage bill, comparable to that of Man Utd and dwarfed in England only by that of the Russians - which no club can compete with seeing as they spend something in the region of 75% of their income on wages. It’s considered good business to spend not much more than 50% of your income on wages, and Arsenal do that. We do have a lot of debt – but so do Liverpool and Man Utd, and Arsenal’s is fixed at a generous 5.3% interest. So all this nonsense about Arsenal players quitting for more money is not always the simple story it seems. Flamini, don’t forget, left on a free so could demand more wages than most.

Wenger is no doubt working on signings as we speak, and there’s nothing more likely to dampen the Arsenal criticism than a new player or two – so over to you, Le Boss.

Chin up, gooners!

I’d forgotten how poor dead rubbers can be.

Bendtner’s bullet header from a sweet Traore cross was only about the second shot on target all game - and we’d had to endure 77 minutes of it. At least the sun had been shining.

Shorn of a need to win, and of much of the creative heartbeat of the team, Arsenal struggled. We played it round neatly enough, but did the classic sideways pass/over-elaboration thing just when it matters - which along with conceding dippy goals at dippy times is, and remains, Arsenal’s Achilles’ heel.

Talking of the sun shining, the queues were too big at half time to even try getting some water from the usual places (or ‘concessions’, as the club would probably call them, just as it no doubt calls us ‘customers’), so I approached someone with a bag on his back selling coke and hot dogs. You could buy both for £5 (yes, £5, it’s not a typo), but not one or the other - ‘company policy’. What a load of old horse that is.

Anyway, I digress. It was a poor game enlightened only by Bendtner’s goal and a couple of excellent performances - first from Alex Song, and second from Armand Traore.

The former, the butt of a million jokes, was pretty commanding at the back, despite his languid nature, and had a really good game. He’s still not the tall centre-half we need but let’s not take anything away from him. And secondly, the bandy-footed Armand Traore was excellent during his cameo, with a couple of surging runs, one assist and a rasping drive that whistled a foot over the bar.

Jens got his deserved 20 minute run-out to bid us all auf wiedersehen , and had some warm comments for the club and fans post-match too. He was a marvellous keeper for us, better in his 2004 prime than anyone who has come since, but it’s the right time for him to go. He was a bit of a mentalist but a strangely endearing one at that. Good luck Jens.

The rebuilding and strengthening will begin in earnest shortly - and there’s a slot to fill where Flamini lived. He’s on the verge of his big money move to AC Milan. The Sun, rather predictably, suggests Flamini ’stuns Gunners’ with the news he’s off. The only thing that has stunned me is how patient Wenger has been. Nigel Flamini was excellent this season, a real powerhouse, but Arsenal were never going to pay him silly money and to be frank, why should they? He’s a great player but not an indispensable one.

Final word on Bendtner. He may be overbearingly cocky and he may not have many mates in the dressing room (though three or four went up to him after he scored yesterday - so who knows whether there’s anything in that rumour), but he has improved massively this season and has the uncanny ability to score crucial goals.

A fair few of his nine goals have come with something to play for - with two match-winning goals (Spuds, Everton), and two match-saving goals (Villa, Liverpool) amongst them. That’s six points we might not otherwise have garnered, so fair play to him. He’s a great impact player and must be retained this summer.

Only one more game before the thumbs start twiddling and the transfer rumours head into Bachman-Turner.

Enjoy the bank holiday. Why do banks need extra holidays? To process all those spurious charges they land upon us? To catch up on all those uncashed cheques they mysteriously hold onto for five days before clearing? A bit of additional time to package up sub-prime debt and pass it on? Who knows.

Update: Flamini has signed for Milan. “I’m very happy” he said. Not surprised, he’ll be earning millions.

Just a brief thought this Monday morning: if both Flamini and Hleb leave (and the Indie reckons the former has agreed to join Milan), they will be doing so using various European legal precedents.

How much are they worth? I’d say Flamini, on this season’s form, and aged just 24, has to be worth something in the region of £10m. And you’d expect to get at least the £11.2m back that Arsenal paid for Hleb - possibly more.

So I’d say, conservatively, we’re looking at £20-£25m that could be used for their replacements should they go. The trouble is, we’re in reality looking at something like £5m - a pathetic amount for two players in their prime.

Part of this is out of Arsenal’s control. Article 17, which has only really come to my attention as a result of this Hleb nonsense, means Alex Hleb can buy himself out of his contract despite having two years left on it. Wenger is rightly up in arms about this. Contracts, already skewed in favour of the player and not the club, are now even flimsier if you fit the criteria Alex Hleb does (under 28, two years left on his contract - I mean who thought this up?)

But I can’t help but think that we could end up looking like right charlies over Flamini. How we all laughed when we nabbed Sol Campbell for nothing, but what goes round comes round, eh? Surely the club hierarchy should have addressed this sooner, even if Flamini was not first choice until this season?

Players come and go all the time and that’s the way it works. But to replace them in this competitive market you need money, and we won’t be getting much of that from these two players if they go. It’s a proper stitch-up.

There seems to be a lot going on, one way or another, doesn’t there? If it’s not players ruling themselves out for the rest of the season it’s players apparently queueing up to sod off.

If Flamini and Hleb want to leave then they will – that’s the reality of football these days and because neither of them do their talking through the tabloids all we hear is snippets from prospective employers. Hleb is not playing in Euro 2008 so we might know his future sooner; Flamini probably will be in Euro 2008 so he might drag the whole affair out longer to see whether his stock, and therefore his market value, rises first. On the plus side, these are not bitter divorces in the Arsely Hole mould we’re talking about – so there’s hope it can all be sorted.

Both players are out anyway, along with Barry Sagna and Abou Diaby, so what with Wenger promising to rest some players, you could probably get considerable odds down the bookies just for predicting the starting line-up for Monday night.

Shall I try? Oh, what the hell. Here goes. A pretty pointless exercise but it passes the time.

Fabianski, Clichy, Toure, Song, Hoyte
Walcott, Denilson, Gilberto, Eboue
Adebayor, van Persie

Thierry Henry loves Arsenal and Arsenal only.

What else? Well, there’s rumour this morning that Senderos might be sold, which I could see happening given his ups and downs this season – though I would only accept it if it was done in order to bring in an experienced replacement, rather than to blood Alex Song, as the article suggests. Alex Song has come on leaps and bounds this season, I will admit as much, but he’s not tall and commanding, and he’s totally inexperienced. He is categorically not the answer at centre-half.

And on that decisive note, I wend my merry way.

That was a pleasant Saturday indeed.

It really had been an age since we last experienced that three-point-glow associated with a weekend home win, really far too long. The weeks between 11th February and 19th April are the ones that people will probably remember this season, but it’s important not to forget what came before. I know I can be guilty of brutal conclusions as much as the next fan, but with the benefit of a little hindsight, hacking the team to pieces for losing three league games out of 35 seems a little extravagant. We’ve improved - just not enough to go from fourth to first in one year. The trick will be to improve again next year, and well, who knows what might happen?

Yesterday we played really well at times, aided by a Reading side patently short on quality - there was never any danger of letting a goal in, despite having Toure at right-back and Alex Song at centre-half. Once the first goal went in, I felt it was a case not of if we would win but by how many, and in the end it was only the crossbar, some excellent last-ditch defending and of course some wastefulness that meant it ended up just 2-0.

Some excellent performances too: Walcott really is coming of age and could have scored one or two, van Persie is finding his feet again following his obscenely long lay-off, and Fabregas was superb. There is no reason why we can’t win our final three league games, and if we do so, it would mean we would come third with 83 points. That would be a staggering points total for the third placed side, wouldn’t it? It just shows how high the bar is set these days.

And what is it with this Fabregas ‘clarification’? With his ability and his age, he was always the most likely candidate to follow in Vieira and Henry’s footsteps when it comes to intractable summer sagas, and I fear we’re just going to have to get used to summer nonsense in his case. He might be here one, two or ten more years, but I bet you we’ll get the same guff each year. The same people trying to unsettle, followed by the same denials. It really is monumentally dull.

Eight days off for the squad now, which in my book is plenty of time for Sagna and Flamini to come back and for either Rosicky or Shergar to be located. So much for ‘Lucky 7′.

Eto’o, anyone? I only mention it because L’Equipe reckons he’s ‘threatening to leave Barca’. What with Henry apparently wanting to come back to London (a worrying thought in itself, because given it wouldn’t be back to Arsenal where could he feasibly go other than to the Russians?) then it’s safe to say that Barcelona are not exactly warming up for the Champions League semi-final in the manner they might want.

I shall stop rambling now.

So that’s it for this season, but nobody can accuse us of bowing out tamely in the end.

Yes, our inability to hold a lead cost us, but for the second time in a week we also played some wonderful stuff and deserved more than the nothing we got.

We’ve actually rediscovered some of the swagger we found incapable of locating for some months – great passing, creating chances – without ironing out all the failings (the wasting of those chances and the less than imperious defending).

Wenger was pretty bullish too, bemoaning the relatively small gap between us and Man U.

Between success and failure this season there was very little. We have to accept that we will not win the title and that is hard to swallow. We do not feel that there is a difference technically and collectively between us and Chelsea and Manchester United.

Perhaps not, but he must accept that injuries – and the subsequent lack of squad depth they exposed – played a massive part. We’ve had Eboue, Diaby, van Persie and even Toure on the wing and none of them is a winger.

Yesterday, we carved Utd apart at times. Adebayor had several great chances – I wouldn’t call them sitters but they were at least kneelers – and had we gone 2-0 up moments after our opener things might have been different. So I accept the ‘fine line’ and ‘bad luck’ arguments when you look at yesterday’s effort.

It’s a bit fanciful otherwise though, in truth. Since defeating Blackburn on 11 Feb, our form has been woeful – W2 D7 L4, and that can’t be explained away by luck or by fine lines. Wenger himself admitted he will analyse what went wrong and act accordingly, and I’m sure he will draw some of the same obvious conclusions everyone else is drawing, namely that some areas need serious strengthening and some players need to be moved on.

We have had a blip since March and we have to analyse what is the reason for that, but I feel again today, and on Tuesday at Liverpool, that we played very well and the biggest target is to keep the team together.

Ominous last line? Certainly one of the first things Wenger needs to do is get Flamini on board and sort Hleb’s ice cream habit out. Both of those players have been excellent this season and we’d be handicapping ourselves by letting either of them go.

So, onwards and upwards. We’ve got Reading on Saturday, a team fighting for their lives but one we must beat. Two months without a home win has been no fun at all.

So the thing is, I’m in France. I caught the game in a ‘pub’ with a 60-year-old man DJ-ing in the background, which was rather abnormal.

We lost. But really, on the night, only just. One soft penalty, some shaky defending - the line is fine but there you have it - what’s done is done.

It was a cracking game, a superb spectacle, a match that tipped one way and the other, but sadly one that finally tipped in the wrong direction.

It’s such a shame that one of the finest runs we’ll ever see from a player - Theo’s staggering 80-yarder - was not the deciding moment. It deserved to be. It was absolutely magical.

What more must Theo do to start the big games? Surely nothing now - he is in the ascendancy, but the only way he can now learn as he needs to learn is by playing. That will almost certainly involve him making mistakes, it will almost certainly mean we’ll see him put in some average performances, but so be it.

Any news on Barry Sagna?

How I yearn for a home win. Yesterday’s draw (our tenth league draw in total) means we have not now won at home in the league for two months. More significantly of course, it means we’re out of the title race too.

“Mathematically it’s not over,” said Wenger. Let it be known now that I hate the mathematical title challenge.

It basically means you can’t win it unless some kind of biblically calamitous turn-around in the form of three teams occurs. It ain’t going to happen. Arsenal fans have known it for weeks and Wenger must have known it for weeks too.

Like at Bolton, the first 45 minutes were so, so bad. For a team allegedly chasing the title, we were disinterested and lackadaisical, a shadow of the side we have at times seen this season. Bendtner was isolated, the two full-backs (Hoyte in particular) were poor and we just looked like we were elsewhere. Liverpool could and should have scored twice. Oddly, just as we picked things up and had a presentable chance (that Bendtner shot tamely at Reina), Liverpool scored.

And like at Bolton, we were a different side in the second half, and we got better with the staged introductions of Adebayor, Clichy and Hleb. Toure headed wide, Bendtner equalised, Fabregas was denied a clear penalty (what do we have to do to get one?) and Hleb had a lovely chance at the end, when rather than shoot he tried to pass his way somewhere else - where, exactly, I don’t know.

But it was too late, especially against a wily and resilient side like them, and away drifted our title challenge for another season.

Had we played like that for 90 minutes, we would have won. But how many times have we chased games this season as a result of starting badly?

I’ll tell you – we went behind at home against Fulham, Sunderland, Man Utd, Spuds, Birmingham, Villa, Boro and Liverpool, only three of which we have gone on to win. Away from home, we let the first goal in at Spuds, Liverpool, Boro, Everton, Birmingham and Bolton. That’s 14 of our 33 games, more than a third. Far too often this season we have not performed for the whole 90 minutes – especially recently. That I suspect is in part to do with fatigue, a small squad running on empty.

And yet we have only lost twice – odd, isn’t it?

Anyway, plenty of time for title post mortems – what of our chances for Tuesday? It’s so, so even. We’ve had three 1-1 draws this season and although Liverpool know that by holding us to a 0-0 they will advance, they also know we can score, that they are vulnerable at set pieces.

It’s our last chance – and it’s theirs too.

I think this tie is wide open.

Yes, Liverpool have the slender advantage of an away goal but to play for nil-nil in the return leg would be pure folly. 1-1 is far from decisive.

We should have won it though, shouldn’t we? We had the majority of the play in the second half, but just couldn’t make it count and were thwarted both by the ref and by the unfortunate Bendtner. Regarding the former, I could see Hleb was certain it was a pen but I couldn’t be 100% myself - I have not seen it again yet but by all accounts it was so obviously a penalty that you have to wonder what the ref was up to. If so, and given he was five yards away, what more did he need? An enormous neon light with the word ‘penalty’ on it combined with a chorus of women doing the can-can across the twelve-yard line?

As for the Bendtner incident - well, it was just one of those things. I suspect he would rather have been anywhere else than in the flightpath of Fabregas’s shot but that’s the way it works sometimes.

I think we played pretty well at times, especially in the second half, without reaching the heights of our incisive best. Once Walcott came on, first on the left then on the right, we looked a lot more dangerous (how many more chances will Eboue get? Seriously, he was awful) and Hleb looks far more potent when playing in the middle, but whatever permutations Wenger chooses we need to step up a gear again for the second leg.

We might need to do so without van Persie too, who did not reappear after the break. “I don’t think it’s a recurrence but it was where he was injured before on his thigh”, Wenger said, trying to put a positive spin on an ominous-sounding injury.

So all to play for. 33.3% of the triple-header is over and we move onto Saturday when - you guessed it - anything could happen.

Odd game, wasn’t it?

I watched in online, in a browser window about four inches by four inches, and for the first 60 minutes I was grateful for the tiny screen. Anything bigger and I might have burst into tears. We started well but fell away after the first goal, then just about everything that could go wrong did so - red card, deflected goal, buckets of northern rain. Let’s be frank, we looked dead and buried.

Odd game though, as I said.

Gallas could not miss the tap-in that made it 2-1, then Hleb somersaulted his way to our equaliser with a clear penalty, and suddenly from the depths of gloom came the buds of a recovery. At this stage I was shouting at my computer - do they ever listen when you do that?

The confidence returned in waves and despite more defensive pressure, we held on and carved out a pinball winner in stoppage time - and what a win it became. We have four whoppers coming up so this was a shot in the arm we needed so, so much.

I don’t think it will affect the title race, but it made me happy - and that’s what it’s all about sometimes. Five league games without a win is pretty unpleasant when you’re not used to it, and it does make me realise how lucky we are as Arsenal fans that we don’t embark upon these kinds of runs that frequently.

Winning - nice, isn’t it?