THERE was a haunting moment over Christmas and New Year which I cannot get out of my head.

No, it wasn’t a rather cojones-less Troy Deeney scoring precisely zero on his specialist subject round during the Christmas special of Mastermind. If you’re wondering, he was sat there in the big black chair, not answering questions on a few Spiderman films he thought he knew.

No, it wasn’t finding that national treasure Stephen Fry had run out of money and has been forced to take up a presenter’s job on hackneyed quiz show Jeopardy.

No, it wasn’t Nottingham Forest dicing with financial fair play rules – in a season where they paid actual cash to take Matt Turner from Arsenal and arrange a loan for Nuno Tavares.

No, it wasn’t sprouts or parsnips.

It wasn’t the annually underwhelming tree in Trafalgar Square, the John Lewis friendly venus fly-trap, the seemingly smaller Quality Street servings, the Royal documentary, board games with the family, the December energy bill, the midnight burning of money by the River Thames to show “London has the world’s best fireworks” or Storm Henk, whoever he is.

It wasn’t even the VAR system giving West Ham United a goal against Arsenal which would have been disallowed if Jarrod Bowen had see-through thighs.

The most haunting thing of the past two weeks was actually Mikel Arteta’s comments after that match with the Hammers which ended in a 2-0 home defeat.

Arsenal had 30 attempts on goal but comically thwacked all of them straight at the goalkeeper.

So Arteta said: “It’s what it is. We have to try to generate. If we don’t score with 30 shots, then we have to do 50 or 60 to try to score.”

We must assume then that the Arsenal manager is envisaging a possible game where the team has to shoot 60 times to score a decisive goal. To do the maths on that, the players would have to be shooting at the goal once ever 90 seconds.

I’m not saying that it can’t be done but let’s agree, it’s quite the ask.

Far be it for me to suggest that a simpler solution would be to have less rather than more shots, but to acquire players who are more likely to score with them.

And – as luck would have it – the transfer window is open now and such strikers could join today with the right determination to add to the ranks.

Only pig-headed stubbornness would lead to the other course of action of ignoring this obvious frailty.