Martin Odegaard [Alexander Canillas/SPP]

IT’S right about now, we must ask.. whatever happened to those gazillion charges that were levelled at Manchester City? A 12 or 14 point reduction would do about right.

Of course, this would be no way for Arsenal to finally win the Premier League but from the frenzied atmosphere at the Emirates Stadium on Saturday night, it could save us all a lot of money in anxiety sedatives.

There’s no easy way to admit this but the second place scars cut deep into Ashburton Grove and when supporters of other clubs say you’ll only bottle it again, it takes weapons grade arrogance not to see it as a distinct possibility.

The runaway leaders in cliché terms have become just the “early pacesetters” – still better than everybody else but without the feelingless lethality of Erling Haaland. You could sense Arsenal’s biggest worries in the last five minutes against the league’s worst team when the players started looking like frazzled Squid Game competitors trying to cut honeycomb cleanly with a rifle next to their head.

Wolves were suddenly as fearsome as Real Madrid and as Arsenal frantically dished the ball in every direction they could, the possibility of a mindless collapse became an almost inevitability. It was only because Wolves really are the worst team in the Premier League that they somehow cooked up a second own goal at an even later last gasp moment. “How @£$! must you be?, we scored all your goals,” the visiting supporters, still waiting for their side to win in the league, sang on the way back to the station afterwards.

Arsenal aren’t @£$! but they do need to work on their nervous system, because if this is how things are going down in December, imagine where we will be in March, April and hopefully May too.

The remedy might just be to keep things simple. As creative as the tactics and strategies have been over the past few years, be it playing matches without a striker or, more recently, pushing Ben White and Jurrien Timber into inside forward roles when you’re away at Aston Villa and there’s probably some defending to do somewhere. Wouldn’t it be more settling to just kick it in the goal, preferably sometime early in the first half? They already have the best players, they don’t really need to be reinventing the wheel. Really they don’t need strikers who are “not just strikers”.

In fact all that needs to happen now judging by the last two home matches, is some basic shooting practice. No more Bukayo Saka clearing the ball over the bar, no more Martin Odegaard scuffing daisy cutters across the turf.

Just kick it in the goal and we’ll all sleep well.