It is that time of year; fans feverishly dissect the remaining fixtures and wonder who has the most comfortable run-in and which sides will rest players. Reading’s supporters would have groaned as word came through on Saturday that Fulham were about to kick off against a weakened Liverpool team but appearances can be deceptive. Liverpool won. It was Reading’s weakened line-up that was costly.

“The 11 were chosen for this specific game,” Steve Coppell, the Reading manager, said. “I’m sure I will make changes for next week but I will be 100 per cent honest. If you asked me now what my strongest team is, I really wouldn’t know. To a certain extent that’s disturbing. I don’t do it [make six changes] to be dramatic. I looked at one game in isolation.”

It is reasonably clear that Coppell’s strongest side is not the one that was outplayed by Arsenal. That the scoreline was not embarrassing owed more to the fact that Arsenal struck the woodwork twice, had one effort cleared off the line and Marcus Hahnemann in goal was, not for the first time, Reading’s most impressive performer. Coppell, though, believes his error was not in making sweeping changes for this game but in failing to buy new players.

“I could have brought new players into the club,” the Reading manager said, “but because they’d done so well over the last two years and met those challenges, I made the decision not to bring people in. At Christmas we were in a healthy position going into the January [transfer] window. Maybe I should have done something at the end of the January window. We always have a post mortem at the end of the season.”

Arsenal’s post mortem has already begun — although Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, is not wielding as big a scalpel. He admitted that “there is more than one” thing he wished he had done differently, but he is sticking to his belief that external forces are mostly to blame for a season that will yield no silverware. “In terms of decisions and referees, we have never been so unlucky as we have been in important situations from March onwards — it’s unbelievable,” he said.

It may have come a fraction too late, but at least Theo Walcott is beginning to live up to the hype. Wenger said that this was the 19-year-old’s best game for the club. “It was his most complete, when he looked most like a man,” Wenger said. “I would say his most mature performance and next season began today for him. You have seen Theo in games at the start of the season when you only have seen glimpses of him and you think that there is something there. And now he is starting to show it for a whole game and I am thinking of starting him for the rest of the season.

“Theo is not a monster, but he has great body power. You see that when he starts to run — it’s like he’s thrown forward because suddenly he’s gone. That is more important than power and his kind of player depends very much on the quality of the player around him because he needs the ball played into the right spot and then move. If we play the ball in the air then he does not exist but here we play to his qualities.”

An accomplished piece of control by Emmanuel Adebayor and a deflected shot from Gilberto Silva were enough to deflate Reading and although the visiting team were more spirited in the second half, they already had their eye on games to come against teams less talented than Arsenal, and less complicated.

How they rated:

Arsenal (4-4-2): J Lehmann 5 - K Touré 6 W Gallas 6 A Song 7 G Clichy 6 - T Walcott 7 F Fàbregas 8 Gilberto Silva 7 A Hleb 6 - E Adebayor 7 R van Persie 6. Substitutes: E Eboué 6 (for Touré, 60min), Denilson (for Hleb, 74), N Bendtner (for Adebayor, 73). Not used: V Mannone, P Senderos. Next: Derby County (a).

Reading (4-1-4-1): M Hahnemann 7 - G Murty 5 I Sonko Y 4 I Ingimarsson 4 L Rosenior 4 - A Bikey Y 4 - J Kébé 3 J Harper 4 K Cissé 5 R Convey 6 - D Kitson Y 4 Substitutes: M Duberry (for Sonko, 73min), E Faé (for Harper, 73), M Matejovsky (for Kébé, 79). Not used: A Federici, K Doyle. Next: Wigan Athletic (a).