Arsenal have ingredients to succeed - let's not let social media negativity detract from that 

Success will surely come from this group, but it is our responsibility to create an atmosphere where it’s okay to fail

It’s moments like these that reduce you to the monosyllabic misery of Milan’s “unbiased” commentator.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch this.

The time will come to pick the bones out of Wednesday’s heartache but today just feels like the brutal declaration of a “gol”, and not for Arsenal. 

Retrospective analysis will tell you that this tie was analogous to our season. We huffed and puffed against the adversity of our circumstances: a midfielder at number nine, an eighteen year old at left back, no one on the bench and so on. It was tight, but margins went against us and ultimately we lacked the quality to convert when it really mattered.

The sad thing about the semi-final as a whole, is that it was slipping away almost from the moment it began.

First when Dembele scored inside five minutes at the Emirates, then when Martinelli missed his chance to equalise. Then when our goal is disallowed and on and on.

Despite only chasing the narrowest of deficits, turning the first leg scoreline around was always going to be a tough ask. This, like the league campaign, was heartbreak by installment.

Such was the frenzy of our early pressure, we threatened to fulfil Arteta and our own wildest dreams, but when Fabian Ruiz blazed home his own precise finish, it was a long road back.

Lamine Yamal said of his Barca side, something along the lines of “it doesn’t matter if the opposition score one, two, three goals. We can always score more.”

For Arsenal, this is not the case. We are a team built to be game state merchants, to control and massage the play into a manageable form: one where preferably Gabriel can rise the highest on a set piece, or Saka can deliver a moment of magic.

The symmetry between the two legs, with heavy dominance from the away side in the opening stages, was unignorable.

The difference was they got their goal. That early hammer blow from Dembele sent shockwaves through the whole tie, and we couldn’t recover.

I thought PSG were much more there for the taking on Tuesday than last week. We were better for large spells, but it’s a contest that has boiled down to both boxes. And weren’t their three goals taken with deadly accuracy?

We could unpick the XG, with our 4.8 across the two legs only yielding a single goal. But we already know we were flogging the dead horse of a midfielder as a striker. We already know we struggle with creativity. Interestingly, if you dig down into the stats a bit, it’s not usually our XG we underperform, it’s that we create fewer bigger chances than many of the big teams.

There are a few things that we have known to be true for a long time: Poor recruitment in the Summer left us short - a situation that went unaddressed in January. 27 injuries to first team players have made the consistency of the previous two years impossible.

Many are calling for urgent and numerous attacking reinforcements and while I agree, I just want to point out that we reached 89 points last season with a fully fit squad. We are there or thereabouts.

Yes, we are sorely missing a challenger for Martinelli’s position. Yes, we could do with a striker.

But let’s not forget we have the ingredients already.

My fear for this squad is the chorus of negativity from Arsenal fans who have been deluded by social media into forgetting where we’ve come from.

Success will surely come from this group, but it is our responsibility to create an atmosphere where it’s okay to fail.

Whatever the weather and all that.