You could forgive Freddie Ljungberg for gazing over enviously at Pep Guardiola as his Manchester City side routed through Arsenal in a brutal first half at the Emirates Stadium.
Lined up behind one of the most revolutionary managers in the history of modern football Manchester City had three assistant managers - including a man high on Arsenal's list to be their next head coach - a fitness coach and video analyst who had been with Guardiola for years and his goalkeeping coach.
Ljungberg has the latter of those, Sal Bibbo being one of the few to have survived the coaching culls after Arsene Wenger and Unai Emery's departments. The high performance team remains unchanged but their work is not done on matchdays.
That aside Ljungberg has been asked to make do and mend. His strength and conditioning coach, Sam Wilson, has come up from the Under-23s and could well be needed back there before too long. His assistant, Per Mertesacker, has even less coaching experience than him and will be needed back at the academy sooner or later.
Ravaged by injuries, worn down by an intense fixture list, Ljungberg has been left holding a crumbling fort almost entirely on his own. Meanwhile Raul Sanllehi and the football executive team are declining to even give him the tools any manager needs to operate in the Premier League.
This makeshift coaching setup supposed to be in place for the Norwich City game 48 hours after Unai Emery's sacking. Four games later here they still are and Ljungberg's bosses won't countenance a change.
"The club have said I have to wait until they make a decision, so yeah, I can't do anything at the moment," Ljungberg told football.london after Thursday's draw away to Standard Liege. "I have Per [Mertesacker] but at the same time he is academy manager but he is helping me with the coaching.
"The club has said when they make a decision then that's it or I'm obviously leaving or maybe then we can do something with the staff. But it's up to the club."
Sources at Arsenal insist a decision on whether to stick with Ljungberg until the end of the season or pursue a new head coach immediately is close to being made. Over two weeks after Emery left it is already too late.
At the most hectic stage of the season Arsenal have a rookie head coach and no-one with any experience to aid him. Ljungberg does not have the time to conduct training sessions at match tempo and in his programme notes he noted that his team was relying on walkthroughs and video analysis.
No wonder Arsenal looked like a team without an idea how to execute their plan pitted against a team with complete surety as to how they would go about things. It was all too easy for City to pass around a disjointed, inconsistent press. Whilst Nicolas Pepe and Gabriel Martinelli hurtled at their opponents Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang sat back, looking to block passing lanes.
Any other team might just fall back on the basic principles they have always had. Emery robbed them of any. He was so obsessive with understanding his opponent that he never stopped to consider who Arsenal could and should be. When the going got tough his team had no Plan A to fall back on, let alone a Plan B.
What little identity Arsenal had under the previous head coach was effectively give it to "Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang or Alexandre Lacazette and hope". The latter of those has been summarily dropped to make room for Martinelli, the latter received the ball just four times in the first half hour. Both are not inclined to sign new contracts, another failing of Sanllehi, Huss Fahmy, Edu, Vinai Venkatesham and the Kroenkes.
Inevitably Ljungberg will be the one who has to explain it.
He leads is a managerial team that has had little experience to learn harsh realities. More seasoned coaches might have left an injured Sead Kolasinac on to at least occupy the left flank or punted the ball out of play so that Bukayo Saka could have been introduced. Ljungberg did neither and Kevin De Bruyne's second won the game.
If there were an assistant manager with experience on the bench alongside the 42-year-old managerial rookie these mistakes may not have been made. But it is clear that Ljungberg knows that. The only people who seem not to have appreciated the difficulty of the situation they have placed their interim head coach in are the men responsible for picking the man who will lead Arsenal into the future.
