I was heartened by the performance against Birmingham. We tore them apart in the first half and we needed two strikers up front to finish them off. I’ve been critical of Osman but he was great today.

The Yak is finished as far as I’m concerned. I never thought he was as good as some people say and now you can see how fat and slow and out of condition he is. His confidence is shot too. He drifts out to the wings because he doesn’t want to take responsibility in front of goal. There was a time when he would have been front and center demanding the ball. Those days are long gone. If anyone has a decent offer for him we shoiuld grab it.

We need a single-minded striker and we need one before the World Cup hype puts everyone’s price tag up 50%. Jags, Arteta, Anichebe — I’ll be surprised if they are starting matches before March.

Even when we get the ball in from the flanks, our strikers aren’t attacking the ball. Cahill was non-existent in midfield (from an offensive stand-point), and Fellaini (who was great at winning balls in the air and breaking up attacks) simply played too far behind and played too many square balls.

Bilyaletdinov did nothing apart from the goal. He didn’t take on anyone or even make any incisive passes that moved the ball forwards. Baines's and Pienaar’s crosses regularly didn’t make it pass the 1st defender (either that or our strikers weren’t attacking the ball). I actually thought Osman did well in the 1st half until he got shunted to the flanks. Any creativity we had just simply died.

Out of our returning players, only one of them (Arteta of course) will make any difference to the way we play. The rest are defensive-minded players (Neville, Rodwell) or defenders (Jagielka, Distin, Yobo). All of whom would probably not have made much of a difference yesterday as Birmingham hardly bothered to cross the half-way line.

Are we really hoping for Landon Donovan to kickstart our season? A loan signing for 2.5 months? By golly, we’re in trouble. We need to play 4-4-2 from here on cos that’s the only way we’re going to have any sort of a chance against Sunderland and Burnley in our next two games. If having greater numbers in the penalty box is the only way we’re going to score goals, then I’m afraid that’s what we need to do.

We’ll continue to dwell in the relegation zone while we continue defending so badly. How much space did Larsson have yesterday at their goal?? Having said that, Heitinga and Neill don’t look any worse than Distin/Yobo.

Finally, when it was obvious Birmingham were parking 11 men behind the ball and being as offensively ambitious as San Marino, why did we persist with only Saha up front for so long? We had lots of possission but, every time we broke forward our players in forward positions were swamped by black shirts.

Obviously no team is too good to go down, but I think we’re suffering a massive loss of confidence and seem to have forgotten how to win. Winning (and losing) is habit forming — look at the RS with practically the same team as last season they look like a bag of shite.

There are a lot worse teams in the league, to cheer yourself up go to BBC football and click on predictor, then realise that all the bottom teams (which we are at the moment) have all got tough games.

It's very important that we get all our injured lads back, as quick as possible, because we could be in for a real end-of-season battle.