We’ve seen it many times before, Arsenal are in a position where they could top the league table by winning a match but then bottle it. But to say that happened yesterday would be unfair.

Hey look, I’m as disappointed and infuriated as you are that we didn’t beat West Brom yesterday but it was always going to be a tough day for Arsenal. And let’s look at Manchester City and Real Madrid this weekend – they could have had worse days at the office.

Arsenal took the lead after another Mesut Özil assist, with an emotional Olivier Giroud heading in from close range. The early signs looked good.

But after that it went pear shaped.

And you could consider all the factors as bad luck:

• Our main enforcer Francis Coquelin got injured and his replacement Mikel Arteta was well off the pace and scored an own goal.
• Laurent Koscielny gave Rondon far too much space to burst into the box and deliver that decisive cross, which you could possibly excuse him for considering the tragic events of last week.
• The goal that West Brom did score was a bit of a fluke, lets be honest. Morrison would whack that over the bar 99 times out of 100.
• The Santi Cazorla penalty – two points here. The first was that there were 2 West Brom players about 4/5 yards into the box before Santi even hit the ball. And the second is obviously the condition of the penalty spot – you can’t blame Cazorla for the penalty spot collapsing.

I would be the first person to condemn Arsenal if they were poor and threw away the 3 points, but considering all those factors that went against us, you can excuse them this time.

Added to that the horrendous injury list we have, it was always going to be an uphill battle yesterday.