Ask Liverpool or City if they'd swap their last few seasons for FA Cup wins. It's always good to win a cup. But for a club like Arsenal, if that's the summit then you have a major problem. We used to win the cup while challenging for the title and battling it out on a serious level in the CL. Both the latter are now so far out of reach it will take a generation to, perhaps, claw back to sufficient levels. Not a single sign of it happening in the last 10 years. Unless you cunt qualifying for a competition you can't compete in as anything other than making up the numbers.

There's always an excuse on hand for the big hurdles and the dead horse. A whole stream of excuses. A decade of them.