Quelle surprise

Waking up this morning to check the result from a 3am kick off Carling Cup Final, I can't have been alone in expressing only mild surprise at the result.

Whilst the odds were stacked heavily in the favour of Arsenal, and on paper there was every reason to suppose this would be a one-sided cruise to a routine trophy win, there is one place that always promised to level things up. That place is inside the heads of Arsenal's players. Has there ever been such a good team, with such a fragility of mind?

Arsenal seek to play football in the creative and artistic manner that their players and, in particular, their manager strongly believe is the right way to play the game. It seems however that allied to this aesthetic approach is the tortured psyche of the classic bohemian artist. For every game in which Arsenal show signs that they are building resilience, demonstrating a more robust physicality and a better capacity for grinding out wins, they always have the ability within themselves to collapse.

This result must be desperate for Gunners fans. When will a better chance come along to get the 'no trophy in 5 years (and counting)' monkey off their backs? The longer that record continues, the greater the pressure with each opportunity. It is difficult to see when they will be presented with another cup final against - with as much respect and credit to Birmingham as is due - against a much weaker team enduring a fairly miserable season. The Blues have previous as the catalyst for Arsenal's now all too familiar 'wheels coming off' Spring routine. It is entirely feasible to see this disastrous resault heralding another collapse. Barca away, United away - forget about the two cups then. As for the League, they will need to pick themselves up having been kncked spark out...and do you believe they can do it?

Having only seen highlights I can't comment too much on the game itself, other than to reflect on the farcical situation that surrounded all three goals. The first was appalling defending. The winner was just ridiculous - even Pique and Puyol know there is a time for Row Z. And as for Arsenal's goal, only they could lose their most important player on the pitch at the time to injury in the act of scoring an expertly crafted acrobatic goal. Laughable.

Birmingham deserve the plaudits and will rightly enjoy their success, and may well kick on from this to salvage mid table obscurity from an otherwise depressing season. They may feel they are not given the credit they deserve for beating one of the big boys in a cup final. The thing is, they would not have beaten United or Chelsea, simple as that. Only Arsenal can crumble like this and they simply have to do something about it.

Maybe the key is in the personnel. All the great Wenger teams had the combative, imposing, physical leaders. Adams, Vieira, Gilberto, Campbell - none of those players had the technique of the current crop, but they also would not have meekly and mildly allowed a Cup Final to diasappear like that or surrendered a 4 goal lead. (It's possible to cite the Owen Cup Final of 2001, but Arsenal battered Liverpool for 85 minutes of that game) The current squad can play better football than arguably any side in Britain over the last 15 years, including their Invincible peers...but they just are not fearsome. They rarely look like steamrollering a league that is there to be steamrollered, this year in particular.

Maybe if not in the players themselves, the key to success lies in a change of approach. Barcelona have shown that great football can be allied to a will to win, and the result is phenomenal success. Not everyone can be Barca though, and indeed most successful teams play a significantly different brand of football. Could this be the path that Wenger should go down?

A change to the Arsenal approach would be a loss to English football - if they were to follow the pragmatic, functinal approach of Chelsea and, this year in particular, Man United, the league would be worse off. The Emirates trophy cabinet, on the other hand...