Paris FC 2-2 Arsenal Women: How Did Arsenal Let This One Get Away?

I was so looking forward to finally writing a different match report.

Arsenal were two-nil up away to Paris FC, Alessia Russo had finally scored from open play, Georgia Stanway had scored her first competitive Arsenal goal and after everything we’ve been talking about over the last few weeks, I was sitting there last night thinking this is it!

Maybe Renée was right, maybe this was Arsenal beginning to click.

And then, somehow, we ended up drawing 2-2.

I’ve not been entirely sure where to begin with this one because there were moments last night when I felt more positive about Arsenal than I have for a couple of weeks.

We scored two goals from open play!

That sounds like a weird thing to be celebrating when you look at the attacking talent in this squad, but given what we’ve been watching recently, seeing Alessia Russo turn and put that ball into the bottom corner felt massive.

Then Georgia Stanway makes it two just after half-time with a superb chest and volley, and suddenly I’m thinking about the preview I wrote yesterday, when I asked what an answer from Arsenal might look like.

Well, there it was. Or at least part of it.

But before we get into what happened next, I want to say something particularly to those of you who are younger Arsenal supporters, because I know we have readers who are 14, 15, 16 years old and I know some of you will be really, really upset about what’s happening at the moment.

And I'm guessing of course that there are plenty of older supporters feeling similar things too.

If you’ve been online since the final whistle, you’ve seen people saying all sorts of things about Renée Slegers, the players and where this season is heading, and when you love this team as much as we Trailblazers do, I completely understand why all of that can make everything feel a hundred times worse.

So we’re going to try and work through this properly.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you everything is fine because I honestly don’t think it is. There are things happening with this team at the moment that I don’t understand, there are decisions Renée is making that I’m really frustrated by and there are things we saw tonight that Arsenal themselves have admitted weren't good enough.

But I’m also not going to tell you that Renée has lost the dressing room, or the players have stopped playing for her, or Arsenal’s season is over, because what some prominent journalists and creators are saying, there is no evidence for any of those things.

And that distinction is really, really important at the moment.

We can be worried without assuming the worst. We can question Renée without immediately deciding that she needs to be sacked. We can be really frustrated with players without suddenly deciding they’re not good enough to play for Arsenal.

And we can look at a 2-2 draw tonight and recognise that Arsenal threw away a game they absolutely should have won, while also recognising that there were signs of improvement in the very area we’ve spent the last few weeks worrying about.

Both of those things happened.

So rather than me sitting here ranting (although I’m making absolutely no promises when we get to the substitutions,) let’s go through what happened, what we know, what we don’t know and what I think we can reasonably take from it.

Because for quite a while last night, I really did think we were beginning to see an answer.

The problem is, even before Alessia Russo scored, there was something I was still seeing that was bothering me.

The goals came, but the extra touch hadn’t disappeared

Before I get carried away with the fact that Arsenal finally scored twice from open play, I don't want us to skip over what happened before Alessia Russo scored.

Because for quite a lot of that first half, I was still seeing the same thing that's been driving me mad for the last few games.

The extra touch.

There were several moments when Arsenal worked themselves into a good position and I could see the pass, the shot, or the opportunity to move the ball quickly, and then we'd take another touch, allowing Paris to get back.

We've talked about this so much recently that I don't want to spend time going over the same ground, but it matters because one of the questions we asked in the preview was whether or not we'd start seeing Arsenal be more instinctive and trust what was in front of them.

For a while, I wasn't convinced anything had really changed.

We had lots of the ball again, we were getting into Paris territory. There were some good combinations and there was nothing about the game that was making me think Arsenal were in huge trouble, aside from the fact Paris were getting into the spaces our full backs, particularly Ona on our left hand side, were leaving behind. 

But at the same, I wasn't sitting there thinking this was the attacking performance we'd all been waiting for.

But then Alessia Russo scored, and what I loved about the goal was how uncomplicated it was.

She gets receives the ball from Georgia Stanway, creates space ahead of the two defenders converging in front of her, gets it out of her feet and finishes into the bottom corner.

That's Alessia Russo.

That's a striker who knows how to score goals being given an opportunity and taking it. There wasn't another pass. There wasn't another touch while she waited for everyone else to get into the perfect position, or maybe a pass back to Georgia. She saw the opportunity, and bang!

You could see what it meant to her. It was her first goal of the season and Arsenal's first goal from open play since Lisa Baum scored against Brighton on the opening weekend, so we shouldn't underestimate what getting that one into the net might do for her confidence going forward.

Then we come out for the second half and within five minutes of the restart Georgia Stanway scores as well.

Two-nil. Two goals from open play! I'm sitting there thinking, right, this is exactly what we needed.

Because sometimes when a team is in the type of situation Arsenal have been in, where everyone is talking about the lack of goals and every missed chance makes the next chance feel even bigger, you don't need to suddenly become a completely different football team.

You just need someone to score, and then someone else scores, and then it relieves a little of the enormous amount of pressure that’s been on the team’s shoulders and they can relax a bit and just play.

Aaron D'Antino said afterwards that the coaching staff felt there had been “real progression” in some of the final-third work they've been doing, and I think that's fair. We asked Arsenal to start turning possession and attacking positions into goals and tonight, for a while at least, they did.

So I don't want what happened later to completely erase that. If you're sitting there this morning thinking there was absolutely nothing positive about last night because of how it ended, there was.

Russo scored, Stanway scored, Arsenal scored twice from open play. Some of the football was better and we got ourselves into a position where, with 40 minutes to go, we were two goals ahead away from home in the Champions League.

That's progress in an area where we've desperately needed to see improvement. But I also don't think two goals mean the attacking problems have suddenly disappeared, because I was still seeing too many of those unnecessary touches and moments of hesitation around the penalty area.

So maybe we've taken a step.

What Arsenal then had to do was manage the fantastic position those two goals had put them in - and that's where I went from thinking I was finally going to write a positive match report to absolutely fuming.

What happened to the Arsenal we saw in pre-season?

This is the bit that really annoyed me.

Because Paris FC's first goal wasn't some brilliant piece of football that Arsenal couldn't possibly have anticipated; we knew this was the threat they were capable of.

I talked about it in the preview. Paris win the ball and they look forward very, very quickly. They did it against Barcelona and scored after five minutes, and Arsenal's coaching staff knew it too. Aaron D'Antino said afterwards that they'd prepared specifically for Paris attacking them in transition.

So when it happens anyway, that's barely forgivable.

Paris get the ball to Evelyne Viens, Arsenal are exposed and Clara Mateo suddenly has a huge amount of space to run into. She gets through, goes around Misa and now it's 2-1.

Watching it back made me think about something that had been bothering me during the game, actually has been bothering me since the start of the season.

What the hell has happened to all those wonderful rotations we were seeing in pre-season?

One of the things I was so impressed with during the summer was how well Arsenal seemed to be covering for one another.

If a full-back went forward, one of the centre backs moved across. If Emily Fox or Smilla Holmberg were caught higher up the pitch, Leah Williamson was really good at coming across and covering that right-back space. On the other side if Ona Batlle went forward, Steph Catley or Lotte Wuben Moy would move across to cover the space and Georgia Stanway or Kim Little would drop back to cover the centre. Players seemed to understand that if somebody moved out of their position, somebody else had to fill the space they'd left behind.

It looked really intelligent.

I remember watching it thinking this is exactly what you want from a team with attacking full-backs like Fox, Ona Batlle and Smilla Holmberg because you don't want to stop those players bombing forward. You just need the rest of the team to understand what happens behind them when they do.

But since the competitive season started, I feel like we're just not seeing any of it, and I'm really struggling to understand why.

I'm not saying Arsenal have somehow forgotten everything they worked on during pre-season. I have absolutely no idea what instructions the players are being given in those moments, and there could be things happening tactically that I'm not seeing from the stands or my living room.

But I can look at what happens when Paris score and I can ask where the protection is.

Especially because Arsenal are 2-0 up, we don't need to chase the game at that point. We don't need everybody flying forward looking for a third as if we're the team that's losing.

And this is where I think we need to separate two things, because Aaron D'Antino said afterwards that Arsenal needed another goal to kill the game.

I understand what he means.

Of course you want the third goal. At 3-0 the game probably is finished and if Arsenal create opportunities to score it, they should get that goal.

But I don't think Arsenal should need a third goal to be able to protect a 2-0 lead against Paris FC.

Those are two totally different things.

You should be able to continue attacking while still recognising the game state and making sure that when you lose the ball, you're not giving Paris the exact situation you've spent the previous few days preparing to stop.

Once Mateo scored, the whole feeling of the game changed, Paris suddenly had belief, and so did their supporters because the stadium became a lot more hostile from an away point of view.

Arsenal started looking less comfortable and now that amazing feeling I had at 2-0, where I was already imagining telling you we'd finally seen real progress, started disappearing pretty quickly.

But this is also where I think we must be careful.

If you're listening to this and thinking, “How can professional footballers make that mistake when they knew Paris were going to do it?”, that's just football.

Knowing what an opponent wants to do and stopping them from doing it for 90 minutes are completely different things.

Players make positional mistakes. In the moment someone gets drawn towards the ball, somebody else doesn't cover quickly enough, a very good opponent sees the space and suddenly you're in big trouble.

One goal doesn't mean the entire defensive structure has collapsed, but what concerns me is that I'm seeing things now that I thought Arsenal had begun solving during the summer.

And that's why I want to understand whether this is simply players getting things wrong in individual moments, if the structure has changed since pre-season, or if Arsenal are still figuring out how all these pieces fit together now that the games really matter.

We don't know the answer to that yet, but we can absolutely ask the question.

Unfortunately, Paris scoring wasn't the only point last night where I found myself asking why some of the things we'd spent the summer getting excited about don't seem to be appearing now.

Because then we have to talk about the squad, and this is where I'm finding it really, really hard, to understand what on earth Renée is doing.

What do Cerci and Reuteler have to do?

This is where I'm struggling the most this morning, because I've spent a lot of this season defending the idea behind Arsenal building such a deep squad, and saying that we shouldn't get too worked up when somebody doesn't play one week because there are going to be so many games, different opponents are going to require different things and Renée finally has the kind of options where she can look along that bench and change the type of game Arsenal are playing rather than simply replacing one player with another.

But I'm now starting to wonder when we're going to actually see her do it, because last night Selina Cerci and Géraldine Reuteler sat on that bench for the entire game and I really, really don't understand it.

Let's start with Selina Cerci because at least we've got some evidence with her in an Arsenal shirt now. She came on against Køge when Arsenal were struggling to find a way through, she was direct, she attacked the space in front of her and she eventually drove into the penalty area and won the penalty that won us the game.

Now, I'm not suggesting for one moment that this means Selina Cerci should suddenly start every Arsenal game or that she's somehow the answer to everything that's going wrong, because we've barely seen her and we don't know anywhere near enough yet to make that judgement. 

But if you're a young supporter listening to this and wondering why I'm getting so frustrated about her not playing, that's the reason. We've seen Arsenal repeatedly struggling with hesitation around the penalty area and taking that extra touch we've been talking about, and then we've seen this new player come onto the pitch and do the exact opposite. So naturally I'm sitting there thinking, well, can we see a bit more of that please?

Géraldine Reuteler is even more confusing to me because Arsenal went out of their way to sign one of the most intelligent and exciting attacking midfielders in Europe, somebody whose movement and ability to find space was a huge part of what made her so good for Eintracht Frankfurt and Switzerland, and we've now reached October and only seen her for a few minutes at the end of the Chelsea game. She came on at Stamford Bridge and almost immediately I could see her moving into those little pockets of space we've talked about, trying to find somewhere she could receive the ball and help Arsenal move forward, and I remember saying afterwards that quite often the problem wasn't Reuteler finding the space, it was if the player with the ball was looking up and forward quickly enough to see her. So I came into this Paris game thinking surely this is an opportunity to see more of her, especially against a team where there were going to be spaces to exploit - and we didn't see her at all.

I've seen people wondering if Géraldine isn't fully fit, if there's an injury we're not being told about or if there's some other issue behind the scenes. But Géraldine has to be fit, she has to be ready to play and there can't be any injury concerns preventing Renée from using her. Otherwise she wouldn't make the bench!

And I think that makes the situation more confusing rather than less, because I'm also aware that questions are beginning to be asked about what Géraldine's role at Arsenal is supposed to be and why the club signed her if they're not going to use her. As ever, I want to be really careful with that because I don't want you taking that and turning it into “Reuteler is unhappy at Arsenal” because I haven't said that and I don't have evidence to tell you that. What I'm saying is much narrower than that. She's fit, she's available and there is some understandable confusion about the lack of opportunities so far.

I share that confusion.

Because if she were carrying an injury or Arsenal were slowly bringing her back to fitness, I'd understand it. We'd have an explanation. But if she's ready to play, then we're back to the footballing question, and that's the bit I cannot get my head around. Arsenal specifically recruited a player with qualities this team seems to be crying out for at the moment, particularly that movement, intelligence and ability to find space between the lines, and then we get a game like Paris where those spaces are appearing and she watches the entire thing from the bench.

So I'm not going to make up an explanation for you because I don't have one.

But I think it's completely reasonable now to ask Renée for one.

Because at 2-0 Kim Little comes off and Olivia Smith comes on, which I can understand. Olivia gives you pace, she can carry the ball and we've been asking to see more of her, so I've got no issue with that. Then, with the game beginning to change, Georgia Stanway and Emily Fox come off and Frida Maanum and Smilla Holmberg come on, and again there are perfectly reasonable arguments for managing minutes because we've got Manchester City on Sunday. But once Paris have scored and the momentum of this game has completely shifted, I'm looking at that bench thinking this is exactly why you have Cerci and Reuteler. If Paris are pushing higher and believing they can get something from the game, there should be space appearing for Arsenal to attack, and we've got two players sitting there who are purpose-built to exploit it.

Instead, Cerci and Reuteler stay on the bench and eventually, once Paris have equalised and we're desperately trying to rescue the game, Caitlin Foord and Stina Blackstenius come on in the 89th minute. And this is where again, I need to be very clear, because I don't want this to turn into an attack on Caitlin, Stina or Frida, particularly for our younger listeners who might adore those players, because that's not what I'm saying at all. These are experienced Arsenal players who have done important things for this club and they'll no doubt do important things again, but right now I don't think any of the three has shown enough this season for their position in this apparent hierarchy to be unquestionable, especially when other players have come in and shown us something different.

That's the bit I can't get my head around. If Cerci comes on against Køge and changes the game, what does she have to do to earn the next opportunity? If Arsenal have gone to the trouble of signing Reuteler because of the very particular qualities she gives you, when is the game where we're going to use them? Because surely it can't only be when Arsenal are already comfortable and everything is going well. These are supposed to be the players who give Renée different solutions when things aren't going well, and last night we had a game that changed completely in front of us and she still went back to the players she knows.

And while we're talking about selection, I also didn't understand Mariona starting on the left against this particular opponent. I love Mariona and I want her in this Arsenal team, so again this isn't about the player, it's about what you're asking the player to do and what the opposition are going to try to do to you.

We knew Paris wanted to attack the spaces behind us, we knew their transition threat was probably the biggest danger they had and if you're going to have a full-back pushing forward on that side, then you have to think about the protection you're giving them. Against this particular team I wanted somebody on that side who was going to give us that attacking threat but also get back quickly and help close the space when possession changed, and I don't think we consistently had that balance.

Maybe there are perfectly good answers to all of these questions. In fact, I hope there are, because that's important to remember when we're sitting here the morning after a game feeling angry and confused.

Renée and her coaching staff have information we don't have, they see these players every day and there may be tactical reasons behind some of these decisions that aren't obvious to us watching from the outside. But that doesn't mean we stop asking the questions when what we're seeing doesn't make sense, and right now I think the biggest question I have about this squad is becoming very simple: 

“Arsenal spent the summer giving Renée different types of players who can change the way a game is being played, so why, when the game starts getting away from us, does she seem so reluctant to use them?”

Because last night we needed somebody to change what was happening.

Selina Cerci and Geraldine Reuteler were sitting right there.

And neither of them moved from the bench.

The penalty was bizarre, but it isn’t why Arsenal drew

And then we get to the penalty, which I have watched back more times than is probably healthy because the first time I saw it I couldn't work out what on earth had just happened. 

Misa has the ball for the goal kick, she knocks it across towards Leah Williamson, Leah waits for it to stop, picks it up to put it down where she presumably wants to take the goal kick from and the referee points to the penalty spot.

Even watching it back now, the intention looks pretty obvious to me. Misa appears to be giving the ball to Leah so Leah can take the goal kick. Leah clearly thinks that's what's happening because otherwise we're being asked to believe one of the most experienced defenders in world football has just randomly picked up a live ball with both hands in her own penalty area, which obviously makes no sense.

But this is where we need to separate what something looks like from what the law says, because I wasn't completely sure about this last night and I've checked it since. Under Law 16, the ball is in play from a goal kick once it has been kicked and clearly moves. It doesn't matter that the ball had stopped moving by the time Leah picked it up.

So if the referee has interpreted Misa kicking that ball towards Leah as Misa taking the goal kick, then the ball is live and Leah has handled it inside the penalty area. Under that interpretation, I can understand why the penalty has been given.

The argument, as far as I'm concerned, is whether Misa had taken the goal kick in the first place, because that's the bit that looks completely different to me. Aaron D'Antino explained afterwards that Arsenal's understanding was the same as ours, that Misa was moving the ball across for Leah to take the goal kick, and he said they felt there should have been some common sense applied to what was quite clearly happening.

I understand their frustration because, usually in football, you don't ignore what clearly just happened just because you found a technicality in the rules, but equally, Arsenal have put the referee in a position where she has a decision to make and that's something D'Antino acknowledged as well.

I think that's probably where I want to leave the refereeing argument because I don't want this article to become about the referee.

I know that's really tempting, especially if you're really upset about the result, because it's such a bizarre way to concede an equaliser and it gives us something very obvious to point at and say, “That's why Arsenal didn't win.”

But I don't think that's true, or at least I don't think it's the whole truth, and Alessia Russo pretty much said the same thing afterwards. Her view was that Arsenal had allowed Paris back into the second half long before that moment happened, and I think she's right.

We were 2-0 up. That's the bit I keep coming back to.

If we're trying to understand what happened rather than just finding somebody to blame for it, then the most important period of this game is what happened between Georgia Stanway making it 2-0 and Leah picking that ball up, because Paris had already scored once by then, they'd already found the space we'd spent all week talking about, the momentum of the game had changed and Arsenal no longer looked like the team that had come out after half-time and taken control.

So yes, I think the penalty is incredibly unfortunate. I can see exactly what Misa and Leah thought they were doing, I can see why Arsenal are frustrated about it and if that happens against us on Sunday at Manchester City I'm fairly certain I'll be screaming at the TV all over again.

But I don't want us to hide behind it.

And especially if you're one of those younger supporters I was talking to at the beginning, this is a good example of why sometimes the thing that happens immediately before a goal isn't necessarily the reason you dropped points. It's the easiest thing to remember because Paris scored the penalty and suddenly it was 2-2, but Arsenal had spent the previous half an hour allowing a game they were comfortably winning to become competitive again.

That's the bit the players and coaching staff can control.

And maybe the encouraging part, if you're looking for one, is that they seem to know it. Russo wasn't standing there afterwards blaming the referee and pretending Arsenal had been robbed. D'Antino wasn't pretending everything had gone brilliantly until one on-the-surface-of-it strange decision. They both acknowledged, in different ways, that Arsenal had allowed the game to get away from them.

Which is why I think the much more important question today isn't whether or not the referee should have given that penalty.

It's how Arsenal got themselves into a position where one bizarre misunderstanding over a goal kick was enough to turn a 2-0 lead into a 2-2 draw.

Ordinarily, this is where we'd hear Renée's explanation of exactly that. But last night, we didn’t get it.

Renée didn’t face the media, so what do we actually know?

Normally, this is the point where I start going through what Renée said afterwards and we try to understand the game from her perspective, because whatever we think about a performance or the decisions she's made, I do think it's important that we listen to her explanation instead of deciding we already know what she was thinking.

But last night Renée didn't do the post-match press conference, Aaron D'Antino did it instead.

Now, inevitably that has become a story in itself all through last night and today, particularly because of everything else that's happening around Arsenal at the moment, and I've already seen people interpreting it as evidence that Renée is under enormous pressure, that something is wrong behind the scenes or even questioning if she's going to be Arsenal manager for much longer.

So let's deal with what we actually know before we get anywhere near any of that.

Renée was at the game, obviously. She was on the touchline throughout it, and after the final whistle she didn't fulfil the usual post-match media duties, with Aaron going out to speak to the journalists instead. Multiple reports from people who were there say she was simply too upset and angry after the way the game had finished to do the press conference, and ESPN have reported that both Renée and some of the players were in tears afterwards. So I think it's probably fair to say that what happened hurt them every bit as much as - arguably more than - it hurt those of us watching it.

And I want to stop there for a moment because I think that's important, especially if you're one of our younger supporters reading this and you've spent the last few hours wondering if these players care as much as you do.

Of course they care.

You don't have to defend every performance or every decision they make to recognise that, and a bad result doesn't mean the players aren't trying or that the manager doesn't care. These are people who have spent their lives getting themselves to this level of football, and whatever questions I'm asking about Renée at the moment, I've never questioned whether or not she cares about Arsenal winning football matches.

In fact, if the reports are right, the problem last night was that she cared so much about what had just happened that she didn't trust herself to go and sit in front of a room of journalists and talk about it calmly.

Now, do I think she should have done the press conference?

Yes, I probably do.

Because part of being Arsenal manager, part of leadership, is facing everybody when things have gone wrong, and I would have liked to have heard from her. I wanted to know why Cerci and Reuteler weren't used, I wanted to know what happened to the defensive structure at 2-0, I wanted to know if she felt the substitutions gave Arsenal what she wanted from them and I especially wanted to hear how she thought a game that seemed completely under control had somehow finished 2-2.

But I also don't want to turn somebody being extremely upset after an awful result into evidence of some gigantic crisis, because we simply can't do that from what we actually know.

There is some information from Paris this morning that I think is really important to put alongside all the noise you're probably seeing online. Tim Stillman from Arseblog, who was there covering the game, spoke to Jodie Taylor afterwards and he says the feeling internally is that there is strong support for Renée and that the players believe they're very close to working their way out of this bad run.

Now, that doesn't prove everything is fine either.

I don't want us doing the same thing in the opposite direction and take one conversation as definitive proof that there are no problems inside Arsenal, because none of us are in that dressing room and none of us knows everything that's happening there.

But it is evidence.

And at a moment when I'm seeing people saying Renée has lost the dressing room as though that's established fact, the information we have from somebody who was physically there and spoke to a senior member of Arsenal's staff points in the other direction.

So if you're worried this morning and you're trying to make sense of all these different things you're reading, this is where I want us to keep coming back to the distinction we talked about at the beginning.

There are things we know, things we're worried about and things we simply don't know.

We know Arsenal's results haven't been good enough.

We know they threw away a 2-0 lead last night.

We know there are tactical decisions and selections that I think deserve some pretty serious questions now, and I'm certainly asking them.

We know Renée was so upset afterwards that Aaron D'Antino did the press conference instead.

But we DO NOT know that she's lost the dressing room, and the information we have from inside the club at the moment suggests the opposite.

That's really important because you can be concerned about your football team without having to believe every doom and gloom explanation somebody gives you for why things are going wrong.

Sometimes a football team can simply be having a bad run.

Sometimes players lose confidence, decisions stop coming naturally, little mistakes become big mistakes and the more everybody tries to fix everything, the more complicated everything starts to feel.

That doesn't mean we shrug our shoulders and say it'll all be fine, because Arsenal are away to Manchester City on Sunday and there are things that need fixing very, very quickly.

But it also doesn't mean everything has completely collapsed behind the scenes.

Renée being that angry tells us something else as well, because one of the criticisms I've heard from supporters recently is that she can sometimes seem almost too calm when things go wrong. Well, she wasn't calm last night. Not even remotely.

Maybe we'll hear more from her before Manchester City and I hope we do, because I think after the last few games supporters need to hear from their manager, and I think Renée probably needs to explain some of the decisions we're all struggling to understand as well.

But until she does, I'm not going to fill that silence with things I can't prove.

There's enough happening on the pitch for us to talk about without inventing things that might be happening off it.

And unfortunately for Arsenal, there isn't much time to sit around feeling sorry for themselves either, because the next team waiting for them is Manchester City.

And I have to admit, that one worries me even more now.

So where does this leave us before Manchester City?

Which brings us to Sunday and Manchester City, and I have to admit this is the point where my frustration last night started turning into real worry, because City have won all four of their league games, Arsenal have taken only taken five points from twelve and if we go to Manchester making the same mistakes we made against Paris, we're going to be playing against a team with the quality to punish them much more severely.

I said to myself after the game that if Renée picks the same team, makes the same substitutions and we see the same things happening again, we may as well not bother going to Manchester and just give them the points, which is obviously me being extremely annoyed and not something I remotely believe now I've had a night's sleep, because of course Arsenal can go there and win. We know how good these players are and we've seen this team produce big performances when they've needed them before, but I think Sunday has become a really important test of whether or not Renée is seeing some of the same things we're seeing and, more importantly, if she's prepared to change them.

Because that's probably where I've landed after trying to work through all of this with you. I'm not sitting here thinking Arsenal are a terrible team, I'm not thinking the players have suddenly forgotten how to play football and I'm certainly not telling you the season is over on the first day of October. What I am doing, probably more than at any point since Renée became Arsenal manager, is questioning some of the decisions she's making because there are things I can't currently make sense of.

I don't understand why Cerci can come on against Køge, change the game and then not get a minute against Paris. I don't understand why we've signed Reuteler, who is fit and ready to play, and we're barely using her. I don't understand why some of those really intelligent defensive rotations we saw Arsenal working on throughout pre-season seem to have disappeared now that the competitive games have started, and I don't understand why, when games begin moving away from us, Renée's response so often seems to be returning to the same old players instead of using some of the different options this squad was built to give her.

Those are questions. They're not conclusions.

And I really want to emphasise that because if you're one of those supporters who's feeling really anxious about where Arsenal are heading at the moment, I don't want you leaving me today thinking I've just spent the time telling you everything is falling apart, because I haven't.

Last night was horrible because of the way it ended, but Arsenal also did something we've been desperately waiting for them to do. They scored twice from open play. Alessia Russo scored her first goal of the season, Georgia Stanway scored her first Arsenal goal and for a period of that game I really did think we were watching some of the pressure lifting off this team. That's real. It happened. We don't have to throw it away because of what happened afterwards.

What happened afterwards is also real though, and Arsenal need to understand it and get to grips with it quickly.

They were 2-0 up and didn't manage the game properly. They allowed Paris to score the exact type of goal everybody knew they were capable of scoring, they lost some of the control they'd had earlier and then a freak misunderstanding between Misa and Leah gave Paris the opportunity to equalise. Russo herself acknowledged afterwards that Arsenal had allowed Paris back into the game before that penalty ever happened, so the players aren't hiding from that either.

Maybe that's the bit I'd hold onto this morning.

Nobody inside Arsenal thinks this is good enough. The players know it, the coaching staff know it and if the reports about how upset everybody was afterwards are correct, they are really hurting.

That doesn't automatically fix anything, obviously, and caring isn't enough on its own. Now they have to work out why these things keep happening and do something about them.

So I'm worried about Manchester City.

But I'm also going to go into Sunday hoping that what happened in Paris forces some decisions, because this has to be the moment where Renée looks at all the options she's got and decides it's time to try something different, maybe Cerci gets her opportunity, or Reuteler finally gets her start, those defensive rotations start appearing again and maybe Russo scoring that goal takes just enough weight off her shoulders that the next chance she gets feels much easier.

We don't know.

And that's probably the most important thing I can leave you with today, especially if you've been scrolling through social media and everyone seems completely certain that they know what's wrong with Arsenal.

None of us knows everything that's happening inside that team.

What we can do is look at the evidence, ask questions when something doesn't make sense and keep supporting the players while still expecting better from them, because those things don't contradict each other.

You can love this team and be upset with them.

I certainly am today.

But I'll still be there on Sunday wanting them to prove every single one of my worries and all their doubters out there wrong.

I really, really hope they do.