Can Arsene Wenger win back the Arsenal fans?

There was no Beast from the East on which to blame the huge swathe of empty seats for the second Arsenal home game in succession.

Such has been the breakdown in the relationship between Arsene Wenger and a thousands of the club’s match-going fans, one night of passion in Milan was never going to win back the trust that more than a decade of decline has all but destroyed.

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And neither will a 3-0 victory over Watford in which goalkeeper Petr Cech being named man of the match was more revealing than the scoreline.

The best you could say about Sunday’s no-show - for the record, the ‘official’ attendance was 59,131 - was that supporters were taking their cue from their manager by prioritising the Europa League, Arsenal’s only hope of salvaging something from a season that has plumbed new depths of misery.

And although it goes without saying that no-one in their right mind would want to see the kind of mutiny taking place at another London club for whom a stadium move has turned sour, the apathy that has set in at the Emirates is no less toxic.

Even those who turned up on Sunday could barely muster the enthusiasm to celebrate when the stadium announcer revealed Shkodran Mustafi’s opening goal was Arsenal’s 1,000th in the Premier League.

And when a hardcore behind the Watford goal struck up a first-half chant of, “Stand up if you hate Tottenham”, they could not convince anyone else to join them in what increasingly became an atmosphere of nervous tension.

It was one Watford fans revelled in, reeling out the now obligatory ditties, “Arsene Wenger, we want you to stay”, and “Can you hear the Arsenal sing?”

The visitors also had enough chances at 1-0 down to turn the home crowd against Wenger, who admitted to suffering sleepless nights following the four successive defeats that preceded Thursday’s win at AC Milan.

But it was Watford who unwittingly united Arsenal supporters in hatred thanks to the comments made by Troy Deeney following October’s reverse fixture.

The Hornets captain, who questioned the “cojones” of Wenger’s men after they surrendered a 1-0 lead at Vicarage Road, was the subject of routine jeers, which turned into the loudest cheer of the day when Petr Cech saved his penalty kick that would have made it 2-1.

But it said everything about the current state of mind of Arsenal supporters that they could only bring themselves to taunt him with chants of, “Deeney, what’s the score?”, when Henrik Mkhitaryan ended the game as a contest.

Sunday’s win will doubtless spark talk of what has become a perennial end-of-season revival under Wenger - and that is precisely the problem.

Arsenal supporters have too often witnessed history repeating itself - with no sign of anything changing - to be fooled again into thinking this will be anything but another false dawn.

The fact that Arsenal chief executive Ivan Gazidis pointedly refused to address Wenger’s future when he attended a fans forum before kick-off suggests even the club’s board may finally have reached the same conclusion.

The verdict

Moment that changed the match

Cech’s first penalty save since joining Arsenal. After his self-confessed horror show at Brighton & Hove Albion the previous week, Cech also produced several other saves to deny Watford a goal that would have set home nerves jangling.

Crowd rating

Watford fans’ taunts were justified until Deeney’s penalty miss, with those Arsenal supporters who bothered to turn up eventually making enough noise to make up for the no-shows.

Match rating

7 - no shortage of entertainment when two sub-standard defences square off.