Right then. Arsenal lose 2-1 to Bournemouth. Havertz gets a 4/10. Martinelli gets a 4/10. Title hopes take a massive dent. And Mikel Arteta walks into the press conference and says it was a "big punch in the face."

A big punch in the face. From Bournemouth. Don't get me started.

In my day, if you lost to a team you were supposed to beat, you walked into the press room, said "we were rubbish," and drove home in silence listening to TalkSport while your wife pretended not to notice. You didn't start doing metaphors. You didn't start comparing a football match to a bare-knuckle boxing contest. You just took the pain like a man and picked the same eleven next week because you only had fourteen fit players anyway.

But that's the problem with modern football. Managers don't just lose any more. They experience trauma. They suffer setbacks on an emotional journey. They get punched in the face by the abstract concept of dropping three points to a team from the south coast.

So I've ranked it. Every level of managerial self-harm metaphor, from mild discomfort to full existential collapse. Because if we're going to do this, we might as well do it properly.

Level 1: "A wake-up call." This is nothing. This is losing to someone in the League Cup third round and pretending it matters. Every manager has said this. It never wakes anyone up. The alarm just keeps ringing.

Level 2: "A slap in the face." Slightly more urgent. Usually deployed after losing to a newly promoted team in September. Implies the squad has been mildly inconvenienced rather than genuinely harmed. The footballing equivalent of stepping on a plug.

Level 3: "A kick in the teeth." Now we're talking. This one tends to come out around November when the wheels are starting to wobble. There's real frustration here. The kind of quote that makes the back pages. Still recoverable though. Nobody gets sacked after a kick in the teeth.

Level 4: "A big punch in the face." This is where Arteta sits right now. And fair play, at least he went with "big." A regular punch in the face is Level 3.5 at best. The qualifier makes it worse. This is a man who knows the title is slipping away and has chosen violence as his linguistic framework. Concerning.

Level 5: "A dagger in the heart." Reserved for late-season collapses. Usually accompanied by staring at the floor for six seconds before answering a question. Mourinho territory. The kind of quote that gets played over montage footage on Sky Sports with sad piano music.

Level 6: "A car crash." This is when a manager has genuinely given up trying to spin anything. The performance was so bad there's no boxing metaphor that covers it. You need vehicular destruction. You need wreckage. I once described a 5-0 loss at Barnet as "like watching a wheelie bin roll into traffic." The local paper loved it.

Level 7: "I have nothing to say." The ultimate. No metaphor at all. Just silence. Just a man so broken by what he's witnessed that language itself has failed him. Keegan after Newcastle. Ranieri before the sack. The moment when the poetry dies and all that's left is the void.

Arteta's at a 4. That's bad but it's not terminal. The problem is where he goes from here. Arsenal have got games left and the title is still technically possible if you squint and believe in miracles.

But here's what worries me. A manager who reaches Level 4 in April rarely stays at Level 4. The metaphors escalate. The body language deteriorates. Next thing you know he's calling a draw with Wolves "a knife in the ribs" and the whole thing unravels.

In my day we just said we were rubbish and got on with it.

Football was simpler then. And honestly? The punches hurt less.