Arsenal save the worst for last under Arsene Wenger, but record mauling was years in the making

Blame Arsene Wenger, blame the players or blame the board. Somebody has to be man enough to take the blame for this despairing night of utter hopelessness.

If any morsel of good taste can come from an infamous 5-1 filleting by Bayern Munich at the Emirates Stadium, it comes in the hope that something has to change at a club that is paying a severe price for a chronic lack of ambition. A club that has forgotten its purpose as a football club, where profits are celebrated above winning prizes.

Losing 10-2 over two legs is the worst savaging suffered by any English team in the history of this tournament. A level of defeat that was never supposed to visit the doorstep of a club from the world's richest, most self-satisfied and smuggest league. This is not only embarrassing, it is for eternity.

The lop-sided nature of the match was a bit like turning up at a funeral three weeks after the corpse had been buried. Only to exhume the body then bury it again.

Arsenal were left for dead in Munich in the first leg three weeks ago, lowered into the ground by Carlo Ancelotti's slick Bayern and all their Teutonic goodness, but some frothy home fans marching on the Emirates demanding Wenger's head decided they might as well have a wake anyway.

They must have been soothsayers because nobody saw Arsenal suffering another deathly, ghastly blow at their own joint.

Wenger had called on Arsenal to produce “a mixture of lucid rage... total commitment, but not a silly one because you have as well, in our game, always to make intelligent decisions".

In such a respect, Laurent Koscienly was found wanting even if he should not have been sent off.

Theo Walcott’s opening goal on 20 minutes suggested a pulse still existed until Koscielny’s late tackle on Robert Lewandowski on 54 minutes prompted another hugely distressing collapse.

Koscienly was harshly dismissed by Greek referee Tasos Sidiropoulos before Lewandowski converted the penalty. The final 35 minutes saw Bayern Munich administer the last rites, probably to Wenger's 21-year run as coach, with Arjen Robben, Douglas Costa and a couple from Arturo Vidal in the final 10 minutes burying alive the 10 men as thousands of wilting home fans drifted away long before the end.

They are all a product of our times, a support who have been educated on the mantra that finishing in the top four on a yearly basis is acceptable. Well, here was sport and football doling out a lesson in its rawest form about what happens when true desire is allowed to die.

Wenger later reminded you a bit of the late Kenneth Williams playing Julius Caesar in Carry on Cleo – "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in infamy for me" – by blaming Sidiropoulos. What a Carry On.

Despite the manager praising his players, the mother of all smokescreens, Bayern only confirmed what many knew with an aggregate victory that did not flatter them to reach the quarter-finals. While the glorious Germans compete to win trophies, Arsenal appear happy to take the money and run.

Their form of profit is clearly not trophies. Not when such a fabled club has lifted only two FA Cups in the past 13 years, one more than Wigan Athletic. It is a plague on all their houses.

By the end of this mauling, some home fans struggled to hold up their ‘Wenger Out’ placards, left limp, stunned and numb by such a grotesque gulf in class. Even in a competition apparently built on the haves and have mores of football, Arsenal are bankrupt on the pitch.

A sub-section of Arsenal diehards (a number apparently approaching 400) had decided to hold what resembled some sort of macabre funeral procession from the old Highbury to the Emirates demanding Wenger quit as manager before their side was butchered.

They stopped short of burning effigies of the Frenchman amid the wake, but ended up managing to invoke the spirit of Finnegans Wake by peppering the cold air in North London with cries that Wenger is “killing the club”. Football fans really don’t do irony.

If they had shown more of a sense of awareness than Koscielny in the second half, they would have realised that the short walk from Highbury to the Emirates illustrates that Wenger has not killed their club.

In fact, he has been a totem of their astonishing rise from Highbury to the high life in becoming officially the seventh richest club in the world boasting revenues of £350m. Yet would the clubs ahead of them in the Forbes rich list, the Manchester clubs, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern or Paris Saint-Germain, accept such an elongated period of stagnation?

As a club, Arsenal are about as far away from death as God. Or the main shareholder Stan Kroenke is from bankruptcy. Yet there remains the feeling that something, the purpose of being an ambitious football club, has died a slow lingering death under Wenger since the last of their national titles in 2004. The board are complicit in the self-made decline.

A figure once revered as the world game’s ultimate stylist, the founding father of their ambition, is a decaying emblem of another era at Highbury, a time when winning trophies used to matter to Arsenal. From the George Graham drab vintage of '1-0 to the Arsenal' it is now '10-2 to the Bayern' as we witness the last days of Wenger.

Wenger could end the season with a seventh FA Cup and access to annual Champions League privileges via the accepted norm of finishing in the top four, but the malady lingers on. They end up being drubbed in the last 16 as much as they qualify for the event. And on it goes.

Wenger was once the architect of their dreams with only the Champions League missing from his CV, but the club's haggard fans find themselves confronted by a Groundhog Day of nightmarish proportions.

It was timely that a psychological BBC thriller called The Replacement was trending on social media amid the fallout from Arsenal’s suffering. All thoughts will turn now to replacements across the club.

One for Wenger, one for Alexis Sanchez, spotted sporting a rueful smile in the death throes as he contemplates parachuting out of this decaying scene, and plenty for large swathes of a rotten team that is decrepit at this level. There are too many failures to mention.

"Good things must come to end," said one of the home banners. Change must surely come this summer when this is analysed. Wenger can do no more.

“It’s a sad day because we’ve gone out again at this stage, and we’re going through a period in our history which is the worst that I can ever remember," said the former forward Ian Wright on BT Sport.

Hope has been abandoned at the Emirates Stadium, a football ground where dreams suddenly go to die.

Amid the rich, wealthy exterior of a London club with the costliest season tickets in the Premier League is the impoverished thought that this has been allowed to happen.

As a football club, Arsenal have lost their way; the very essence of what it means to wear the badge has been lost on this generation of Gunners.