“WE will not talk about titles tonight,” Arsène Wenger said last Wednesday evening. “I’m not in the mood.”

Hardly surprising that he should feel that way after watching his Arsenal side take a 1-0 lead at home to Swansea and fashion from it a defeat which devastated their title chances. A few days prior, they had lost 2-3 to the most vulnerable Manchester United side most supporters have ever seen.

It was supposed to be so different. Key players were coming back to fitness; Alexis Sanchez was raring to go, Francis Coquelin returned to shore up the midfield, Danny Welbeck finally began his season with a 95th-minute winner against Leicester.

They’d come through a difficult winter, during which they were reduced to fielding the same eleven game after game because there were no other players available, and were now going to accelerate away towards the title.

But they didn’t. Instead they have been limp, their performances insipid, and went into yesterday’s north London derby with their title chances hanging by a thread. There’s no urgency, no ‘hustle’, as the Americans would say. Just blank looks and shrugged shoulders and missed opportunities.

“We lack hunger,” Sanchez told a Chilean TV station this week. “The mentality we need is that we are winning 1-0 when we go out onto the pitch. Sometimes we lack this hunger to believe that we can be champions.”

Those sentiments have been echoed by observers throughout the press in recent days and are hard to disagree with. Arsenal have been so flat, so deeply underwhelming in the face of an opportunity beyond their wildest dreams, that the entire club is being questioned harshly.

Wenger is bearing the brunt of it, the received wisdom being that ‘bottling it’ when the going gets tough is a typical trait of a Wenger team. And yet, we all know that isn’t necessarily true. What Sanchez described resonates strongly with the way opponents spoke of Arsenal’s 2004 Invincibles, feeling that the game was lost before they even entered the pitch. That side, and its mentality, was cultivated by Wenger, as were the teams which won the double in 2002 and 1998, the latter occasion seeing them haul back a huge points deficit to claim the league over Manchester United.

But there is something going wrong, and ultimately he is the man responsible for it. In truth, it most likely isn’t any one thing as simple as ‘hunger’. Sanchez himself demonstrates more desire on the pitch than almost any other player in the league, but is as guilty as anyone of underperforming, having contributed little more than wasted energy since his return from injury.

This is about an entire squad all playing way below their true level. Take Petr Cech and Mesut à zil away and they’d be in a scrap for the Europa League spots. Sanchez, Olivier Giroud, Theo Walcott, Aaron Ramsey, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and, to a lesser extent, Coquelin have recently been bringing almost nothing to their team’s cause, and the reasons for such a collective loss of form can be difficult to pinpoint.

They are not helped by the ongoing injuries to Santi Cazorla and Jack Wilshere, two players they would rely on to dictate the team’s play from deep. Ramsey is a very good midfielder, but his strength lies in box-to-box play, not performing the work of the maestro at the heart of it all. Perhaps pushing him higher up the pitch to make late runs into the box and bringing à zil deeper might work. The German has vision and a range of passing that very few in Europe can match, but would they miss his insight around the box too much?

Finishing is also proving to be a concern for Arsenal, with normally reliable strikers wasting an unusually high proportion of the opportunities which fall their way. ‘Expected goals’ — the figure beloved of all modern football statisticians, based on the number and quality of chances created during a game- — suggested the Gunners should have won against both United and Swansea. More than anything else, it was the relative paucity of their finishing which ultimately cost them.

These are just some of problems to which Wenger must find a solution as soon as possible. Thanks to the bizarre nature of the league this season, the remaining games could still see them win the title at one extreme or drop out of the top four at the other. But it should never have been in doubt, and whichever outcome they achieve it will be impossible to escape the feeling that they could have delivered so much more.

Editor’s Note: Hugo Saye is an English journalist who spent nine months in Jamaica shadowing 2012-2013 National Premier League champions Harbour View FC, where he spoke openly with stars of both sport and politics and discovered the importance of football in the Caribbean island, which formed the background of his book Of Garrisons and Goalscorers.