Almunia is a broken man

Arsenal's failure to either replace Manuel Almunia or fully confirm his role as number one has created a time bomb waiting to happen.

We may have beaten Bolton with some ease yesterday, yet the first 15 minutes were a nightmare, where the keeper terrified both his defenders and the crowd with a bizarre series of actions that never made it onto the highlights, but which showed a player desperately struggling for confidence.

When keepers are mentally not right, their kicking and their positioning falls apart.

Almunia, whose body language always suggests a breakdown is just a second away, produced a nightmare in both areas at the start of yesterday's game.

As early as the fourth minute, a simple kickout from a backpass went feebly to a Bolton player just thirty yards up the pitch. The crowd, fundamentally uncertain about the Spaniard, immediately got on his back – the misanthropic whinger who sits behind me up in the East Stand piping up with his constant complaint about him being "f*c$ing useless" .

That was bad, but his chasing down of balls around the penalty area was just weird.

When the ball ran loose outside the penalty area as Bolton's moves fell apart, on three occasions Almunia decided to do the defenders jobs for them and go after the ball. Fine, you think, and in keeping with the "sweeper-keeper" role Almunia inherited from Jens Lehmann.

But really, really not fine, when you do it without giving a call to your defender, dragging them into the same space you're running into, and causing unnecessary panic. He did it to poor Sebastian Squillacci, making a fine debut as the deeper lying centreback. Squillacci chased down a loose ball towards the right corner flag, a totally undramatic situation. Haring out though as he went toward it went Almunia. He never called once, just chased over. Squillacci turned in panic, hearing a player baring down on him, and looked shocked to see the goalkeeper coming for it. It allowed Kevin Davies to close in and a safe ball ended up being given away as a throw-in in a dangerous position.

A minor detail perhaps? Maybe. Except he did exactly the same thing to Kieran Gibbs in the opposite corner about two minutes later.

It was a crazy start, and against better teams than Bolton it would have cost us goals. I don't blame Almunia for it, his head is shot. I blame Wenger, who left uncertainty dangling over his head for a whole summer. And it's only causing us problems, making a decent keeper into an accident waiting to happen.

I don't know how we fix this, maybe just the run of games will iron out the creases in Almunia's head. But every Arsenal fan should be wary, because this is going to cost us a big goal in a big game and on yesterday's evidence it will do it very very soon.

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