Even silver linings are overshadowed by clouds for Arsenal these days.
Within an hour of a victory in which he had joined the select group of players who have scored 100 goals for the club, Robin van Persie was admitting that he had put on indefinite hold any plans to renegotiate his contract.
Not that the club would have been surprised. An attempt to arrange a meeting to hold formal talks had been met by the response that the club captain would rather wait until next summer, by which point he will have only a year left on a contract that runs until 2013.
With wounds still fresh following the summer-long saga that saw Samir Nasri – in the same contractual situation as Van Persie will be next year – eventually move to Manchester City, Arsenal are faced with another ticking timebomb. Their captain, totem, leading scorer and most accomplished player is in a position where he can engineer a transfer and, in truth, there is little they can do about it.
Gooners can rail against the injustice of player power but, strip away the bonds of club loyalty, who can blame Van Persie for wanting to bide his time and weigh up his options at the end of the season?
VAN PERSIE'S ARSENAL RECORD
Season Starts Sub apps Goals
2004-05 18 23 10
2005-06 21 17 11
2006-07 25 6 13
2007-08 20 3 9
2008-09 38 6 20
2009-10 18 2 10
2010-11 26 7 22
2011-12 8 0 5
Even for a player who is far too well acquainted with the fixtures and fittings of the club's medical wing, the Dutch striker will not be short of suitors in England or on the continent who can double his salary and give a firmer guarantee of challenging for trophies.
The Dutchman's seven years in north London have yielded a single FA Cup triumph in 2005 when he was merely the fourth-choice striker and a fringe player.
His peak years have been a tale of dramatic near misses and following the exit of Cesc Fabregas, Van Persie has become the poster boy of Arsene Wenger's fabled, but failed, youth project.
He turns 29 next August and will sign what, in all likelihood, will be the last major contract of his professional career. His current deal was signed in 2009, and is believed to be worth £70,000 a week. Fabregas was the club's highest earner on £90,000 a week before his departure for Barcelona, and Nasri himself turned down a similar wage for the £180,000 a week on offer in Manchester.
During the next nine months, Wenger will be asked an avalanche of questions about his longest-serving player's future and his responses will doubtless be based on his optimism that Van Persie's next contract will be on Arsenal headed notepaper.
But Arsenal cannot afford a repeat of the demoralising Nasri saga. It would be naive and reckless to assume that Van Persie will stay when the evidence is stacked against it.
If Arsenal were to win a cup – the Premier League title is already a distant dream – in many ways it would be even easier for the Dutchman to walk away. With a medal in his pocket, he could pack his suitcase and hold his head high.
However much Wenger may detest it, the modern player, especially those recruited from overseas, does not have the same affinity or loyalty to the club as previous generations did. If those who hail from Rotterdam, Barcelona or Marseille get a better offer they invariably move on.
While Van Persie's contract runs until 2013, the desire to renegotiate before summer 2012 is obvious. Allowing a player to enter the final year of their contract in the post-Bosman era opens up the possibility of them leaving for nothing when their deal expires.
Arsenal cannot afford to take a £20 million hit on such a precious asset and if Van Persie tells them in May that he wishes to seek new pastures, the club should sell up and give themselves enough time to find a blue-chip replacement. Spending the entire window trying to squeeze an extra few million quid out of potential buyers is likely to prove as counter-productive as it did with Nasri.
Indeed, there is a strong argument for saying that Arsenal, with £50m still in their transfer kitty, should offload Van Persie for an even more substantial fee – say, £30m – in January and bring in a new centre-forward at the midway point of the season.
This strategy proved to be effective for Liverpool in terms of selling Fernando Torres to Chelsea and integrating Luis Suarez and, to a lesser extent, Andy Carroll, into the team.
Failure to prepare for Van Persie's exit would be unpardonable, given the catalogue of executive errors that led to Nasri's departure.
If the player's mind is not made up, fine. That is his right. But Arsenal cannot afford to be on the back foot again and it is their duty to be far more assertive on this occasion.
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