Arsene Wenger Is the Only 1 to Blame for Arsenal's Troubles

Arsenal's sticky start to the season continued on Saturday after they were saved from an embarrassing defeat to Hull by a late Danny Welbeck strike.

The point leaves them in eighth place in the Premier League, with just two wins to their name, already nine points behind leaders Chelsea and facing an uphill battle if they want to launch anything like a title challenge.

After the game, Arsene Wenger conducted an interview with the BBC's Jacqui Oatley, in which he was asked a series of seemingly quite reasonable questions, but responded in a manner that one might charitably call "spiky."

Among other things, Oatley asked: "Two wins out of eight matches in the Premier League this season. Who or what do you think is to blame for that?"

To which Wenger replied: "Why do you always want to blame people?" before adding: "I don't understand the question."

Wenger was clearly in a bad mood after the game, but the problem is that this was not an isolated incident. This sort of behaviour would have been out of character for the Wenger of five, six, seven years ago, but now it seems to fit, seems to be perfectly in character for the Wenger of today, an increasingly irritable manager in the face of mounting criticism.

And that's understandable. Wenger may well feel that the calls to "spend some f------ money" that rang around the Emirates last year, as reported by The Independent, have been answered with the expensive recruitment of Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez, while the striker that many demanded arrived in the shape of Danny Welbeck. Wenger may well feel like he cannot win.

However, Wenger cannot pretend that his Arsenal squad is in good shape. The quality in some positions is questionable, most notably in goal where Wojciech Szczesny makes far too many basic concentration errors to be considered anything like a top-class goalkeeper, and, of course, in defensive midfield, where Mikel Arteta is a decent sitting player but not in the same league as those possessed by Arsenal's rivals.

Then, of course, we have the injuries, which Wenger recently described as a "coincidence," as reported by ESPN. In that case, there must have been a lot of coincidences over the years at Arsenal, whose problems with ailments of various types became a punchline long ago.

According to the website Physio Room, which tracks injuries in the Premier League, Arsenal currently have seven players on the sidelines, including Ozil, Laurent Koscielny and Olivier Giroud, and that doesn't even include Theo Walcott, who has recently returned to training but is not yet fit to play in the first team.

But even these things are traditional Wenger blind spots. He has long been seemingly unable to spot glaring deficiencies in his own squad, deficiencies that have not been quite enough to make Arsenal absolutely terrible but have been more than enough to prevent them reaching the very top.

More troubling for Arsenal fans is the blatant neglect that has left their squad in this state, most obviously in defence. To start the season with just six senior defenders, one of whom was a 19-year-old who was effectively first back-up in two different positions, looked ludicrous at the time and is proving to be at least that now.

This has, of course, inevitably lead to Nacho Monreal, a player who is defensively suspect in his natural position of left-back, having to fill in at centre-back. His deficiencies were laid bare on Saturday as Mo Diame brushed past the Spaniard as if he wasn't there on his way to scoring Hull's (admittedly illegal, after the pull on Mathieu Flamini) first goal.

This is probably the reason why Wenger was so tetchy in his interview with Oatley. He snapped at the suggestion that someone should be blamed for Arsenal's predicament because he knew he was the one to blame.

Wenger seems aware that he has made a colossal mistake, and he is covering up his embarrassment with aggression.

Wenger can snap at reporters all he likes, but if he wants to find the real reason for Arsenal's troubles, he knows where to look.