Arsenal's problems have been a hot topic this week, ahead of tonight's home match against Manchester United, and a host of reasons have been advanced for the Gunners' failure to keep pace with the other members of the Premier League big four.
Chief among them in the wake of last week's 2-1 defeat at Stoke is their alleged lack of courage. That claim was refuted by Arsene Wenger, whose anger was understandable even though he didn't choose his words too carefully. The Arsenal manager was right to argue that some teams are over-physical with his talented youngsters, and it is clear that sometimes Arsenal's beautiful football is lost amid the mayhem created by opponents.
Arsenal have enjoyed considerable success, even on the road, against the most physical teams in the past two seasons, however, and early this season they dealt fairly easily with Blackburn and Bolton - two of the archetypal rough teams that caused problems in the past for the Gunners.
Clearly there are other reasons for Arsenal's decline (at this stage last season they had seven more points) and the principal one is lack of goals, or more specifically Emmanuel Adebayor's lack of goals.
Last season the Togo striker brilliantly stepped into the chief striker role vacated by Thierry Henry, finishing as the Premier League's joint-second top scorer with 24 goals. As the 2007/08 season developed, Adebayor's importance to post-Henry Arsenal became increasingly apparent and was thrown into stark relief as their title challenge evaporated in the final two and a half months of the season.
Most observers traced Arsenal's loss of form to the 2-2 draw at Birmingham on February 23, the match in which Eduardo suffered the horrific injury from which he is still recovering. If it is true that Arsenal's nerve was affected by the sickening sight of Eduardo's twisted and broken leg, then no player can have been more affected than his strike partner Adebayor, whose form tailed off alarmingly from that point.