Arsenal vs West Ham United - Emirates Stadium, London - Saturday 7th April 2007

There have been some very disappointing performances from Arsenal this season. We have dominated games but failed to win them, usually through not being anywhere near clinical enough in front of goal. We have created loads of chances in games but failed to take any of them. And we have been guilty of defensive lapses which have cost us goals, and put us onto the back foot against teams that were then happy to defend for the rest of the game. Sometimes we have just not showed up for games at all, and have had too many performances from players that either didn't seem interested or good enough. That is why, by the beginning of March, we were out of the title race and out of all of the cups too, our season effectively over bar the fight for 4th place.

This game featured bits of all of this, so was like the story of an entire season condensed into one depressing 90 minute football match. It was our first defeat at our new stadium, strangely against the team that were also the last to beat us at Highbury. We had 29 shots on goal during the game, and failed to score a single one of them. Many of them were truly excellent chances, not just speculative shots, but we still could not convert any of them. With practically their only shot of the game, West Ham scored a goal which might have been offside, certainly contained huge slices of luck other than that, but ultimately won them the game.

With no home game for the previous month, the clocks having gone forward, a 4 day weekend, and the sun out, everybody was full of the joys of spring in the run up to the game. It actually reminded me of the first day of the season, great weather, and a chance to catch up with people you hadn't seen for (comparatively) ages. Despite our abject performance at Liverpool the previous week, and the obvious trouble scoring goals without Henry and Van Persie, people seemed reasonably confident that we could get a result.

So, losing this game was the low point of our season for a number of reasons. West Ham are in the bottom three and have been all season, and this means that they have now had the maximum 6 points from us this season - a complete joke for a team of Arsenal's aspirations. The performances from some players summed up their seasons, and underlined why they ought not to be at the club next season. Baptista, Hleb, Aliadiere and Ljungberg in particular seemed to be playing like they actually want to be fired in the summer. Baptista especially needs to either lose a few stone in weight, or go back to Madrid.

But for me, the most worrying aspect of the game was the sheer lack of confidence in front of goal, which seemed to evaporate even more as each chance was missed. The three best chances fell to Fabregas (thundered a shot against the bar), Gilberto (hit the post), and Adebayor (had a header saved at point blank range by Robert Green) - and as each chance was missed, you could see players heads go down. These three were probably our best players on the day, but none seem to believe that they can score, and each time they are proved right, it just gets even more difficult. We created enough chances to have won this game several times over, but our inability to do so is the story of the season. Actually losing the game was even one step worse than that.

Amidst all this, it is unfair not to acknowledge the outstanding game that Robert Green had in the West Ham goal. Not the first keeper to have had a great game against us this season, but his performance was worth the 10 out of 10 that many reports gave him the following day.

I do not go as far as many Arsenal fans, who viewed this game as an unmitigated disaster, and the culmination of a run that should see Arsene Wenger sacked, and the stadium bulldozed (or whatever some of the more kneejerk of our supporters go on about). We have had a bad run of results, but we lost to a last minute winner against Everton (these things happen), Liverpool admittedly was a disaster, but in this game, we could have won by 10 clear goals! The fact that we didn't is undoubtedly a cause for significant concern, but we are doing mostly the right things.

It is a huge concern that we seem totally unable to score at the moment (to be honest it is hard to see where our next goal might come from, or indeed whether we will ever score a goal again). The race for 4th place now looks difficult, especially given our current run. The consequences of failing to finish 4th do not bear thinking about. All of which makes next Saturday's game against Bolton (our main challengers for 4th place), a massive, massive game, where we quite simply must do better than this.