Amid the bedlam of a City Ground survival party, Mikel Arteta cut a subdued, thoughtful figure.
He was probably wondering how a title challenge that lit up the Premier League could be extinguished with such painful predictability.
The formal termination of their ultra-faint hopes of somehow clambering back above Manchester City came with an ordinary performance against a fired-up Nottingham Forest but they knew - and we all knew - that this was just a case of officially accepting what has been in plain sight for some time.
