Gunners' plight is a reminder to be careful what you wish for

Arsenal fans wanted Arsene Wenger out because they felt the club needed to go to another level, and that’s exactly what has happened.

The trouble is that level is a fair bit below the one at which they were operating under the brilliant Frenchman, and that has caused the departure of his replacement Unai Emery.

Now the Gunners find themselves staring into a future far less exciting than the era of consistent excellence they experienced (I was going to say enjoyed but most of their fans didn’t actually seem to enjoy it as much as they should and moaned instead) when Wenger was in charge.

They receive Brighton tonight desperate to arrest a slump that has seen their season turn sour after a bright start that yielded seven wins and just one defeat in their first 11 matches.

They have now drawn six and lost two of their last eight assignments and look increasingly poor, while their latest performance against Norwich last weekend offered few indications they are about to rediscover their best form under caretaker boss Freddie Ljungberg.

Even allowing for the fact the Invincibles days are long gone, it was surprising to see how bad Arsenal were. Not knowing your best 11 is generally one of the least important faults a manager can have, but in this case it is a concern because it arises as a result of so many of the squad being in such moderate form.

There is little creative spark, a chronic inability to dominate in midfield, counter-attacks - a traditional Arsenal trademark - seem to develop in slow motion these days, and there is an obvious lack of confidence throughout the team.

Norwich v Arsenal is a fixture I am always fond of because it revives memories of one of the few great quotes to emerge from the usual drudgery of pre-match press conferences. Wenger once chartered a plane to get the team to Norfolk and, when asked by journalists why he had done so given they would be airborne for just 14 minutes, he replied with brilliant simplicity: “That’s why we are flying.”

But Sunday’s match at Carrow Road will have brought little mirth to Arsenal fans, especially the closing stages when it was their relegation-threatened hosts who were bang on top.

It will be fascinating to see what the future holds for the north London club, whose position within the big six threatens to be valid on heritage and reputation alone at the rate they are going.

It is hard to be wildly optimistic. They boast two superb forwards in Lacazette and Aubameyang, but elsewhere there are painfully few players with the quality to help get them back into their previously permanent home in the top four of the Premier League.

And they are paying a huge price for one of the most astonishingly poor pieces of recruitment of recent times when, in the summer, they offered insultingly inadequate bids for Wilfried Zaha and then spent £72 million, more or less enough to have secured the Palace wizard, on Nicolas Pepe, who may come good in the end but is currently a pale shadow of the magician from south London they should have coughed up for.

Dani Ceballos has shown glimpses of brilliance and his hamstring injury represents a big slice of bad luck, but as things stand Arsenal fans who dislike their team playing so many games on Thursdays and Sundays are set to be able to enjoy more traditional match days next term, although only because a European place looks so unlikely.

The decision on who replaces Emery is crucially important, and it does not appear significant progress is being made in the task of recruiting someone who can point the ship back in the right direction.

Sometimes when a club needs a new boss it is because they have experienced an uncharacteristically bad run of results and potential candidates are attracted to the role because they know normal service should, under the law of averages, resume fairly soon.

But what is normal service for Arsenal? It used to be a top-four finish and a decent cup run or two.

Now it feels like they have somewhere between the seventh and tenth best squad in the division, and as such the manager’s job is far less enticing.

Football cries crisis far too often when big clubs falter, but in this instance it feels like something slightly more permanent than an unusual run of poor results is afoot, which would be a shame because Arsenal have been a magnificent organisation for most of the last quarter of a century even though many of their own fans were often so reluctant to acknowledge it.

How they would respond to the Gunners slumping to such a degree that it would be impossible to include them in the notional big six remains to be seen.

On-air swearing is the new commentator's curse

It happens so often these days that we have become fully accustomed to it, but as we approach the third decade of the 21st century it feels about time presenters of live sport were excused the requirement to apologise every time a microphone picks up the utterance of a swear word.

During the recent transmission of a live FA Cup tie, the commentator was forced to issue no fewer than four apologies, even though at no point did I hear anything remotely offensive.

And at Cheltenham last month jubilant jockey Sam Lee, explaining to ITV’s Alice Plunkett how he had won aboard Golan Future, managed to stop himself somewhere between the u and the c of the f word, prompting Ed Chamberlin to say sorry if any viewers were offended.

The first thing to emphasise is that it is not at the discretion of the broadcasting team whether or not they let a swear word go without an apology. They are obliged to do so in accordance with Ofcom regulations.

The issue is more whether the communications watchdog needs to be so stringent in its regulation of what strikes me as a pretty insignificant problem, especially as there is no apparent hard and fast rule about swearing on TV beyond the existence of the loose 9pm watershed.

I cannot grasp why a commentator has to solemnly apologise to viewers because he thinks he may have heard a supporter shout “wee wee” from the stands yet simultaneously on other channels you will watch films or topical panel shows in which actors and obscure comedians will be firing off profanities every fourth word.

Moreover, where football is concerned, apologies only seem to be issued when individual voices, be they from supporters or players, are heard to swear, whereas if 30,000 people decide to chant as one that the referee is a w***er nothing is said.

The most preposterous apology I ever heard came from a golf commentator who thought he had heard a player swearing in his native Spanish as his drive headed towards a lake.

I understand that some people are still offended by bad language, and we need to avoid a free-for-all in which co-commentators and pundits carry on like Chubby Brown, but I’d have thought even the most sensitive viewer would readily accept the odd rude word is bound to be discernible every now and then in the course of a live broadcast.

And when apologies are issued as regularly as they are it actually draws attention to incidents of swearing that most people would not even have been picked up on.

I want to enjoy watching sport without unnecessary and irritating feeling that I am seven and that my nanny is trying to protect me from exposure to something that does not bother me one iota.

Outsider Ruiz ready for rematch

It is right that sport should play a key role in promoting just and worthy causes and in denouncing racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry that still blight society.

Its power to enthrall us gives it a platform that enables it to do untold good, and thankfully most of the time it fulfils its moral responsibilities well.

There is, however, a limit to the burden sport is entitled to carry in terms of making the world a better place, which is why it is hard to be in full agreement with the view that anyone associated in any way with the staging of sporting events in Saudi Arabia deserves heavy criticism.

There are obviously deeply disturbing and downright appalling aspects to the Saudi regime, but when the UK government approves the sale of arms to the country that amount to hundreds of millions of pounds one has to wonder why a boxer or jockey should be castigated for trying to grab a far smaller piece of the nation’s riches.

There could be money to be made from the heavyweight title fight between Anthony Joshua and Andy Ruiz Jr in Diriyah on Saturday.

I was extremely surprised to see Ruiz Jr available to back at 2-1 and bigger given how comprehensively he beat Joshua when they met in June.

The Mexican-American was a late replacement for that fight and has had time to prepare properly for the rematch, and I fancy him strongly to do another job on Joshua, who now has to prove he has the mental strength to climb through the ropes and take punishment.

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