European curtain has surely fallen on Arsene Wenger, whose Arsenal side is irretrievably lost

Arsene Wenger wore a black suit and looked for all the world like a bank manager who’d wandered into the wrong building when he briefly ventured out from his seat during the difficult early knockings of another torrid night in Munich. He slapped his hips at some indiscretion or other on his players’ part. This man did not seem to belong to the febrile space where Champions League trophies are claimed.

The impression was compounded when it had all ended and he arrived, looking like a broken man, to discuss the defeat. Wenger meandered through a half-hearted explanation – essentially, the loss of Laurent Koscielny – but had to concede that his players were “mentally jaded” and that the last 25 minutes had been “a nightmare.”

Answers breed further questions at junctures like this: such as, how a team can be psychologically bereft on the most significant night of their season? Wenger didn’t have the stomach for that. He seemed to have made an arrangement with Arsenal’s communications director, Mark Gonnella, that they wouldn’t be hanging around.

After two minute and 50 seconds, Gonnella called time and the two men leaped to their feet and marched out of the room.

It was hard to feel angry or indignant about the manager having no predisposition to talk. It was pathos which accompanied Wenger out of this place last night; melancholy that an individual who has delivered so much to his club and his sport is caught on a carousel of defeat. It’s about 18 months since Arsenal lost 5-1 on their last visit here. A very basic statistical extrapolation tells us the team are flatlining in failure.

This might well prove to be the night which brings the curtain down on Wenger’s long and frustrated search for a European trophy, though he has certainly been coming here for long enough to know where his side’s deficits reside and to do something about them. That mental failing is precisely what he talked about before leaving the city 12 years ago, after a 3-1 defeat. "I don’t know if it’s down to psychological reasons or physical reasons,” he said that night. “What do you expect me to say? I could cry - it would be easier - but life goes on.”

There was an initial challenge of sorts on Wednesday night. Koscielny did offer a robust barrier to Robert Lewandowski and his departure was significant, not least because the absence of Petr Cech, whom Wenger had steadfastly kept on the bench, removed the alternative organiser. But it really only felt like time had been suspended since the teams' last meeting here.

The English side’s left was the flank the Germans targeted: a place where Arjen Robben versus Kieran Gibbs was a match made in Munich heaven. Wenger’s players tried doubling up on Robben by putting Granit Xhaka there but it made little difference. Bayern danced around the back on the overlap and Robben danced towards the extreme right edge of the Arsenal box. He had buried the ball into the high reaches of David Ospina’s net before as much as a solitary challenge had been placed. ‘Red and White Kings’, one of the banners on the north stand states. It didn’t take royalty to crash though these defences.

It was not just the despair but the momentary hope that proved devastating. This was not a vintage Bayern and for 20 minutes or so after the clock ticked past 9pm here, we saw that slight drop-off in German intensity that comes with a more benign manager. It offered Arsenal a shaft of light in the depths of a very black tunnel. Alexis Sanchez, the one player on the level Arsenal need to occupy, seized upon it like a man possessed.

The threat he posed and penalty he scored were only fragments of the story. Sanchez raged with the referee, was booked, raged some more and was pushed away by his captain. At the end he crouched alone, pitch side, looking for all the world a man who wants away, to a club with more ambition than this.

You wondered when the second half began, at 1-1, whether there might be a way of finding the intensity to turn the screw on Bayern and start to make them suffer. The pace of Danny Welbeck going at Hummels sprang to mind.

Instead, when we reached the defining minutes of one of those nights on which seasons hinge, Arsenal conceded again to a transparently obvious threat that all of football had been talking about, these past few days. A delicately lifted cross from Philipp Lahm was the only requirement for Lewandowski to rise above Shkodean Mutsafi and score. The Lewandowski heel was the axis of the third goal. Even the careworn Thomas Muller joined the party by the end.

Being “efficient defensively” is what Wenger had spoken of. He will surely never now recover a side who are irretrievably lost in Europe, bereft of any vocabulary.