Arsenal punished for worst 45 minutes of the season

Arsenal were as bad as you are likely to see them all season, hopefully at least, as we completely failed to turn up and let the horrible Stoke City cruise into a 3-0 lead by the break. Fair play to the Gunners for improving in the second half, but wre were deservedly punished for the worst 45 minutes of the season.

And that is saying something after Arsenal have had plenty of games to choose from so far. The tone was set in the first minute, with Stoke easily winning the first few tackles and the Gunners fgailing to deal with their cross from the wing and then Chambers producing a schoolboy error in the middle to gift Peter Crouch a tap in.

It took nearly 70 minutes for us to recover from that and if Alexis had scored rather than hit the post before Cazorla got our first goal from the penalty spot, maybe we would have completed the comeback and even gone on to win. Ramsey scored a great second and even with 10 men we came close.

Maybe if the referee Anthony Taylor had not had yet another poor game things might have been different, but he did us very few favours, including a second yellow for the hapless Chambers when he could have shown a bit of leniency, as he had been doing to the Stoke players all day.

The fact is though, that you cannot expect to get anything from a game you start that badly.