Mikel Merino was a "fish out of water" up front in Arsenal's loss to West Ham United, and Mikel Arteta should now consider a formation change, according to Charles Watts.
The former Real Sociedad midfielder was given the nod as an emergency number nine in the London derby after coming off the bench to devastating effect against Leicester City, netting a late brace in that 2-0 win at the King Power.
However, Merino failed to make a similar impact from the first whistle in the 1-0 defeat to the Hammers, where he missed one big chance and only had two shots in the entire game, both of which were off target.
With Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz out for the season, though, Arteta is down to the bare bones up front, and his only real alternative is to recall an out-of-sorts Raheem Sterling and stick Leandro Trossard up top.
Asked by Sports Mole how Arteta might address the situation moving forward, Watts replied: "I really don't know. Merino had very little to work with against West Ham. He did look a little bit like a fish out of water, and I was worried that that was going to happen.
"Leicester made Arsenal look pretty ordinary for 80 minutes in that game, which says a lot, but you can come off the bench in that situation and do something. Starting games is very, very different when you're a midfielder and you've never played up front. And he did very much look like a midfielder who had never really played up front before.
Watts "convinced" Merino forgot he was Arsenal's striker
"There were times where I'm convinced he'd forgotten he was playing up front, because West Ham would break and Merino would be charging back to his own penalty area to try and stop it.
"He [Arteta] was asked about changing formation. And it's something the more the weeks go by, I really feel is a potentially good option for Arsenal. You still have to find a forward in that formation, and it still might be Merino, but maybe you can get someone who plays a little bit more close to him centrally.
"If you go with a wing-back system and have whatever you want to call it in or out of possession, 5-3-2, 3-4-3, you could potentially get someone playing off Merino, or use Ben White and potentially Kieran Tierney as wing-backs to provide the threat.
"The options they have now, I just don't think it's viable for two, three, four, five weeks in a row. He'll probably start with Merino again, just because there's no one else; I don't think Sterling comes into the conversation at the moment, such is his form. But it's a struggle."
Arsenal's toothless attacking display in their loss to West Ham - where only two of their 20 shots were on target and another 10 were blocked - invoked more fury towards the powers-that-be and their failings to address the club's attacking shortages in the January transfer window.
The Gunners could not have signed another Premier League player on loan having already filled up those two spots with Sterling and Neto, but they opted not to pursue the likes of Mathys Tel and Randal Kolo Muani.
The latter has already scored five goals in seven games for Juventus since joining on loan from Paris Saint-Germain, although Watts still feels that Arsenal's summer failings have had a bigger impact than their quiet January window.
'Definitely people available' to help Arsenal in January
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"I do think that it's a collective thing," he added. "Arteta is such a powerful figure at the club now that he will have a big say in how things are done. I still feel the mistakes were made in the summer. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I do feel they'll look back at the summer now and think that's where we got it wrong.
"In the Premier League, if you get a summer wrong, it takes a long way to recover from that. You basically have to wait until the following summer. You can try to do bits and pieces in January to rectify it, but it's always very difficult.
"The summer is where you have to do your business and you have to get it right. Largely, Arsenal have got it right in the last few years. But they tried to get Sesko, that didn't happen. But they had a long, long time to think, 'OK, we can't get him, do we really have to wait for Benjamin Sesko another year or shall we pivot?' Arteta will be very much involved in that decision-making process.
"But when you get to January, there was an opportunity, albeit a difficult one, for Arsenal to do something. To do nothing was a real, real gamble. And it's a gamble that has backfired pretty spectacularly. A lot of people will say it is difficult, you don't want to just get anyone for the sake of it. I get that.
"But the loan market was open abroad. You can't tell me there was no one abroad who would help you in the second half of the season. Even if they're not at the standard to help Arsenal for two, three, four years, just for six months to give yourself other options, there definitely had to be people available."
Arteta does have one out-and-out striker in his ranks in the shape of 22-year-old Nathan Butler-Oyedeji, the academy graduate who made his first-team debut off the bench against Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League last month.
Butler-Oyedeji has put up an impressive set of numbers in Under-21s action this season, producing seven goals and six assists from 10 Premier League 2 appearances, but he is yet to play a single minute of Premier League football.
Is Butler-Oyedeji just making up the numbers?
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The 2003-born striker is set to leave the Gunners when his contract expires at the end of the season, although Watts does wonder whether he might have a chance to impress if Merino cannot replicate his Leicester heroics in the near future.
"It feels like that," Watts said when asked if it felt that Butler-Oyedeji was simply making up the numbers. "If you're not using him now when you've got no forwards, then that says an awful lot. There was a chance that he was going to get released in January before his contract's up at the end of the season. I don't think there's any realistic possibility of that being of him getting a new one.
"I think he's on his way out of Arsenal now, which tells the story of exactly how they feel about him and whether he's ready for this level. If you were him, you'd probably be sitting there a little bit disappointed, thinking, 'come on, just give me a chance.' You never know what could happen.
"Could he do any worse than what anyone else is doing at the moment? I don't know, I don't think we're at that stage yet. But if he sticks with the Merino experiment for another couple of games and we get very similar results to what we saw against West Ham, then maybe he does come in into the equation.
"If Arsenal don't get any results in the next couple of weeks, even Arteta can't sit in front of the cameras and say 'over my dead body, the title's not over.' He will know it's over. So then maybe you do try something out over the final game. But I don't think realistically he is the guy."
Butler-Oyedeji is nevertheless expected to make the trip to Nottingham Forest on Wednesday evening, but Watts also explained why victory at the City Ground is unlikely to do much good for Arsenal's wafer-thin title chances.
Ben Knapton
