For crying out loud, play for the shirt!

It's amazing how taking one or two days to digest a bad result does to you. Perhaps I should do it more often.

Still, and despite having calmed down from the fury that descended upon me (and many of you, I'm sure), there was no doubt that not only was the result a massive disappointment, but more worryingly, the performance was an absolute shocker.

Now how many times have we said that already this season? Not just this once is the answer!

For all our promising play and our recent win up at City, it was all undone in ninety minutes of utter profligacy and lack of professionalism. Of course, Newcastle deserve massive credit for their application and the way they went about things to secure a richly deserved win. But if we're being brutally honest, we just did not look like we knew how to score, and we wouldn't have done so had we played another ninety on top.

The manager has come in for a fair bit of stick for his youth policy and so forth over the years, but it was easy for all to see the other day that he cannot really be blamed for such an absolute shocker (apart from claiming that we were unlucky, but that's another story). Wenger will not have envisaged that a squad of supposedly intelligent, highly motivated sportsmen would let him down to such a consistently embarrassing extent. Let him down they certainly have, as he, and we, were faced with a bunch of overconfident idiots who keep thinking they can just turn up and roll over teams. And yet they keep getting knocked back in the most humiliating of scenarios.

Wake up call? Well, they certainly don't seem to have quite caught on the idea that to win, you have to turn up AND fancy playing. And it might be too late should they realise that anyway!

Everyone out there, from Fabianski who seems to be finally back on form again, to Fàbregas, who just looked grumpy and did not fancy it, to the once-practically tearful Chamakh, they were all just bloody awful. And for that I felt sorry for Wenger, who fidgeted helplessly on the touchline, trying to change things round, whereas we all knew that no matter who came on, we wouldn't be able to muster anything. Let's be brutally honest about it: even a draw would have been daylight robbery from our part.

I had warned about the potential pitfalls of facing a confident Newcastle team with a young, promising striker grabbing the headlines in Andy Carroll so soon after a European defeat and so soon after their thrashing derby win. I had expected a difficult match, no doubt, against spirited opponents, who would come and try and play their way, attempting to claim a big scalp if they could.

What I did not expect, however, was to see the players of Arsenal Football Club turning up with a terrifying air of unhealthy cockiness and a dire lack of respect for the opposition. They got exactly what they deserved. And we all have to watch and suffer.

I do not want to see that again. Certainly not again this season, if we want to be, and the players claim to be, good enough to be in contention for anything whatsoever.

Then again, we have of course already said that after Sunderland, after West Brom, after Shakhtar. The list is starting to grow now, isn't it?

The match at Molineux is make or break in many ways. We are taking on a side full of confidence, having given Manchester United a game, dispatching the other Manchester club prior to that. Mick McCarthy will send a team out full of strong, committed players willing to get in our faces, and they will no doubt pose us the same problems that United were faced with the other day, whereas our players will have been brought crashing back down to earth with that massive helping of humble pie.

In that respect, I worry about the potential consequences of such an already difficult midweek autumn night's trip in the first place anyway (not to mention that the dainty daisy that is Karl Henry will be out on the pitch too)!

But if these players are actually as good as we have been led to believe, as good as we know they can be when they fancy it, then they simply have to go and win.

Being a top footballer, sportsman, or anything in life really, is not all about how gifted you are. But about how much you really want it, how much you are ready to go out and give it your all to reach your goal, knowing that no matter what happens, you have tried your utmost best.

Are we good enough to win the title? Undoubtedly.

Will we win it? No, not on this evidence. Before even entertaining the thought of winning it, these players have a lot of winning over to do first.

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