Arsène Wenger conceded that Arsenal are running on empty last night after a goalless draw at home to Fenerbahçe left them limping towards the first knockout round of the Champions League. Arsenal should still qualify because they require a single win from fixtures against Dynamo Kiev and Porto, but Wenger is concerned about his players’ lack of sharpness in a run of three matches without a victory — much their worst form of the season — before Saturday’s visit of Manchester United.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s side needed a late goal from Ryan Giggs to salvage a 1-1 draw away to Celtic, making it the first time for three years that the four English clubs had failed to register a win between them in a Champions League week, but it is Arsenal who approach the showdown with the Barclays Premier League champions with the greater problems as their players continue to drop like flies.

Manuel Almunia was left out against the Turkish side because of a stomach bug and Mikaël Silvestre suffered a suspected broken nose after being caught by Semih Sentürk’s elbow, joining a lengthy injury list featuring William Gallas, Emmanuel Adebayor, Emmanuel Eboué and Theo Walcott. To make matters worse, Robin van Persie starts a three-match suspension on Saturday. After claiming that Stoke City had set out to injure his players last weekend, Wenger was more relaxed on the subject of Silvestre’s bloodied nose, but the Arsenal manager was willing to own up to his side’s deficiencies.

“We had three or four clear-cut chances in the first half, but in the second half we dropped physically and were less dangerous,” Wenger said. “You expect Arsenal to create chances in the last 20 minutes and we didn’t do that because physically we lacked the resources.

Watching Arsenal every week would be rather repetitive were it not for their infuriating capacity for self-destruction. Even when the characters change, the narrative remains the same.

A combination of circumstance and contrariness led Arsène Wenger to make sweeping changes to his side last night, but the introduction of new personnel failed to freshen up what is becoming a tired old plot. As they invariably do, Arsenal played enchanting football. With Cesc Fàbregas orchestrating, they passed the ball around with invention and crispness. Fàbregas created chance after chance, but they missed them all.

It is easy to see why Arsenal fans become frustrated. Raised on such a rich diet, their constitutions cannot cope with anything remotely bland. In the nicest possible way they resemble spoilt children, always expecting the best and treating anything different as if it is the worst. And so the cycle repeats itself, with the players aware of the demands to come up with the perfect goal and so reluctant to offer anything even slightly scruffy.

Arsenal’s football was pure parody for much of the first half, a work of art beautifully constructed but ultimately worthless. Were they mocking the notion of art itself?

If a feeling of deflation hung over the east end of Glasgow at the final whistle, it did not last for long. This was a night on which Celtic restored a little pride and, if their satisfaction was tempered by a late Ryan Giggs equaliser for Manchester United, consider that, until their endeavours and their comparative technical deficiencies caught up with them in the second half, they had succeeded in flattening the deeply uneven playing field on which Anglo-Scottish contests are played out these days.

Some may argue that the Scots had a helping hand from one of their own — Sir Alex Ferguson, who, but for Giggs’s 84th-minute goal, would have been left to count the cost of his decision to leave Edwin van der Sar and Gary Neville at home and to start without Patrice Evra, Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov.

Those decisions were made with at least one eye on the Barclays Premier League encounter with Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium on Saturday lunchtime, but, by the time Giggs finally cancelled out Scott McDonald’s exquisite opening goal, this had become the kind of battle for which United had initially seemed ill-equipped.

By the end, it was a different story. With Berbatov, Rooney and Evra all thrown into the fray, United were so dominant in the closing stages that Celtic were hanging on for dear life. Match statistics said that United had more than 73 per cent of the possession — almost unheard of at this level of football, particularly for an away team — and had struck 30 shots to Celtic’s six. It felt even more one-sided than that at times, but, with Celtic defending heroically, Ferguson was gracious enough to say that Gordon Strachan’s team deserved something, if only for their spirit and for the sublime skill that McDonald showed in putting them ahead, lobbing Ben Foster, who is regarded by many, not least Ferguson, as the next England goalkeeper.

In the dreams of their supporters, Arsenal are like James Bond: suave, sophisticated, elegant, with the cold eye of a killer. The trouble is, on nights such as this, they better resemble those old-fashioned Bond villains, the type that left the captive spy suspended over a pool of sharks and departed the hide-out taking his death for granted, strangely reluctant to seize a gun and simply finish the job. Against Fenerbahçe, Arsenal should have had seven; instead, they settled meekly for the double 0.

As it is, they remain one win away from qualification in group G and, with Dynamo Kiev next to visit North London, few are expecting late drama. Another performance as wasteful as this, however, and who knows? As Chelsea discovered in Rome on Tuesday, what appears a straightforward task in the Champions League can turn arduous if a team take their eyes off the ball, and Arsenal have certainly done that of late. Their past three results have been disappointing, and each for a different reason. Against Tottenham Hotspur, they led 4-2 and surrendered two points by conceding late goals; away to Stoke City they were undone by long throws and physical confrontation; here, they kept a clean sheet — only their second in all competitions since September 30 — but squandered a series of chances to win the game.

Robin van Persie was the worst culprit, but far from the only one. He danced around Fenerbahçe, light on his toes, but failed to deliver the knockout punch, putting one in mind of the comment by the late Brian Clough on Trevor Brooking, a delightfully delicate midfield player for West Ham United and England. “He floats like a butterfly,” Clough said, “and stings like one.”