Arsenal: Remember that time we needed two wingers?

Arsenal’s attack is definitely lacking something, and it’s not hard to deduce what it is. It’s that one need that we just kind of ignored.

Yeah, I remember that time too. That time when Arsenal entered a summer throwing all their eggs in the basket of their creative midfielders, only for their creative midfielders to do what they’ve always done – be inconsistent.

Well, we need them not more than ever, and I think we saw that best of all against Chelsea.

Other than the fact that we couldn’t knock home wide open chances in front of goal, there was a key deficiency from the wide angles, and it had three nasty heads.

The first head was that we relied on our fullbacks to provide the width, which in turn left them woefully exposed when the attack ended up going the opposite way. I can’t count the number of times Monreal or Bellerin were left so far out of position that they might as well have just hung out and waited for the next Arsenal attack.

More from Pain in the Arsenal

• 3 standout players from 1-0 victory over Everton
• 3 positives & negatives from Goodison Park victory
• Arsenal vs PSV preview: Prediction, team news & lineups
• 3 talking points from Arsenal’s victory at Goodison Park
• Mikel Arteta provides Gabriel Martinelli injury update after Everton win

The second head (and these are getting progressively worse, by the way) was that there was often not a sole in the wide positions to even make a difference. The primary source of success with the Arsenal attack was coming from those times when we did have the ball from wide, and a low cross was sent in.

Handfuls of chances came from such scenarios and it could (arguably should) have led to an extra two goals, at the very least.

But the third head, and the ugliest of them all, has to do with the crosses that went all the way through to the other side, and there were a couple.

When a ball gets zipped into dangerous areas like that, it should never go all the way out of play. There has to be someone, someone that stayed at home to send another one in and, in the absence of a wide threat, that wasn’t the case.

There is such a clear and present need here that is only going to live on. And there will be matches where they aren’t needed, when Ozil and Mkhitaryan are both effective enough at driving right down the middle. But as we saw against both Chelsea and City, that won’t always be the case, especially against top-tier teams that own the center of the pitch and suffocate all intruders.

Nothing can be done now, and that’s the worst part, but hopefully it can change in the future, because it’s hard to imagine any concrete progress without it.