Yeah because we couldn’t string a period of play together because we kept getting fouled.
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He’s done a marvelous job. Arsenal had become a joke by the time he took over, having made a lot of the same mistakes that Utd were making. It was not an attractive role given things were likely going to have to get worse before they got better. He came in and oversaw brave decisions, steadied this ship during those difficult times, and ultimately turned them into a very impressive side. And for most of that period he had them playing really enjoyable football. That 3-1 win at the beginning of spring last season was one of the more impressive performances I saw any side ever put in against a good Klopp side. That appears to have been their high point though. It was one of the last times, maybe the last time, they met a good side head on and outplayed them playing the style that got them there.
Obviously they came up short for a second year in a row and looking like they will again this year. I think the situation they are facing is a reality that the things that get you from C to B are often not the things that get you to B to A. In lots of areas it is new leadership with a variation on those older ideas that is needed to make that next step. It is possible, even likely, he isnt the guy to give this genuinely very impressive side the final tweak they need. It would be a shame in football terms if that excellent work got waved away in the bantz of him failing to win it again. He is annoying and has turned what was for a couple of years an enjoyable side into annoying cryarses, but the quality of his work there should be credited
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As I have often stated before, it must be borne in mind that they have been up against two outstanding sides domestically. No matter how hard you try, it isn’t easy to depose teams of the quality of Manchester City and Liverpool.
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I think also their serial failure to get a signature win against City until this month is psychologically telling. Their big ‘coming of age’ win against City at the Emirates just got bettered by LFC going into the Etihad to take the same 3 points - leaving them having dropped 2 points as against LFC versus City.
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In the end, I think Arsenal and Arteta are simply encountering the difficulty of improving a really good side. There isn’t a great reservoir of great talent in terms of players or managers they can readily turn to - it is easier to get that decision wrong than to get it right.
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Yeah, I have raised this analogy before - Middle income trap - Wikipedia
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Not in my opinion. Emery had done quite a lot of work getting rid of the deadweight by then. I give arteta credit for seeing through.
But give Emery 750m and he would have built a team which would have won the league by now.
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He was there for 1 year and not only did he not do anything meaningful there he was not very involved in those personnel decisions in his time
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Did manage to sideline Ozil etc etc. The point is that Arsenal allowed Arteta the time when they didn’t give Emery that time.
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Emery both made him Captain and then later publicly fell out with him, but made no moves to move him on. It was not until Arteta came in that he and Edu committed to sweeping out all the highly paid underperforming players, even at big expense to Arsenal, to give them room to grow as a proper team.
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wasn’t the next step there to move on from him.? Again Emery didn’t get that time. Sure he made him captain. Who else was there at that point of time ?
So Arteta doesnt get credit for making the tough decisions he did because we imagine Emery would have done the same thing he chose not to do but might have later down the line?
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Did Emery get the time needed to make that decision?
Emery would have made Arsenal into a better club than Arteta. I’ll stick by that.
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Arteta has spent serious money and to date matches Ten Haag in his achievements. One FA Cup.
He didn’t address the gaping hole of a problem at centre forward. He thought Jesus/Havertz would get the goals to win a PL. Imagine that…
He took a one hundred million pound playmaker and made him second fiddle to Partey . Rice was much more effective under Moyes. That says a lot.
Klopp won things at Liverpool with much less outlay. Arteta is a poundshop Guardiola and will be gone in the summer. They will try to get Klopp, he wont come…Allegri will be next on the list, but the owners will reckon they’ve spent enough already.
And by the way…
Saka being compared to Salah is a fucking travesty. Its like comparing Mick the singer in the Irish bar in Benidorm with David Bowie. One is the King, one is a fucking poor pretender.
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They will grab Ancelotti for 3yrs… We know he will go anywhere
Arteta is clearly a really, really good manager. It’s interesting that they were going to appoint him when Wenger left, but suddenly changed tack and went for Emery. I wonder what would have happened if they’d stuck to the original plan?
You don’t get three consecutive second place finishes without being really good, I don’t care how much he’s spent - that’s no guarantee of success.
But he has some odd blind spots. His refusal to really go for the jugular, both in game and longer term. Turning the team into a weirdly boring set piece machine which isn’t particularly sustainable, and he comes across as not particularly emotionally stable, like the pressure seems to really get to him. I think like his mentor he might just be a bit of a weirdo.
In the midst of this, as I’ve said before, I think there is a lot of believing their own hype going on at the Emirates. I think the hardest step in football is going from a really good team to a truly great one, and too many people around Arsenal - the players, the staff, the fans, the journalists - seem to have ended up think that at some point it would just be their turn to win the league, and that final step would just happen.
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Has it ever been clarified as to why Edu left Arsenal last year, given how the project with Arteta seemed to be working, it seemed a bit sudden?
I think they likely needed to see Emery fail with the legacy players they had previously bet the house on to allow the “cleaning house” strategy to go through. And without that approach any manager would have failed. SO I think in that case you see a novice manager “failing” with no big project being undertaken to use to mitigate the poor results, he’d have been turfed out in around the same time frame (season and a bit) as Emery was.
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Bigger job (in scope, not prestige) and presumably more money
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I think Arteta also got some what lucky with some of those older players walking out on their contracts. His cleaning house could have stalled had PEA and Willian stuck around to see their contracts out.
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