We can moan all we like about the type of football Bolton play (it’s not my cup of tea, to put it mildly), but the only people to blame for our 1-1 cup draw is us.
There was a stats page in yesterday’s programme that revealed just about all that needs revealing about Arsenal’s Achilles heel this season. Forget all the nonsense about not being able to cope against muscular northern sides: our main problem is starting slowly and conceding first.
We might be unbeaten at home but the stats don’t lie – in the seventeen matches we’ve played at home this season, we’ve conceded first an astonishing ten times.
Everyone knows how hard it is to win from a position of 0-1, and the stats back that up too. In those ten matches, we’ve only gone on to win four of them.
So there’s your problem.
Here’s another interesting fact for you, which backs up the argument that we start too slowly (and makes me glad I’m in the north end of the ground). We’ve only scored 11 goals at the south end – the end we usually attack in the first half – whereas we’ve knocked in 27 goals at the north end, where we usually attack in the second half.
All those in the south end are being goal short-changed.