Having more than established ourselves as pretty consistent Premier League runners up under manager Mikel Arteta, the 2024/25 campaign promised so much over the summer for a wide variety of reasons.
Since his arrival at The Emirates Stadium, our 43 year old gaffer has built the squad well and given himself a number of options in terms of our depth, and he has also spent big with the backing of the board to improve the overall quality in the group as well. So, when Jurgen Klopp moved on from Liverpool many felt that they would need a period of time to find their feet under new manager Arne Slot, and then Manchester City’s remarkable fall from grace as Pep Guardiola significantly struggled this year, well, it was music to the ears of many fans and the likes of the Betway sponsored Seaman Says podcast.
However, sadly it just did not work out that way and our age old ‘striker’ issues came to the fore, along with an inability to kill too many games off leading to too many dropped points with draws, and although we more than kept our heads in front of Manchester City, we just could not close the gap down on an unexpectedly consistent Liverpool side.
With a handful of games remaining in the season, second place is ours once again, as is Champions League football for another year, but there is significant, and understandable, frustration that we were unable to truly capitalise on how the season played out and secure that top spot and the title for ourselves once again.
Lee Dixon recently sat down with former team mate Seaman and despite the frustration at missing out once again, he still felt that Arteta deserved plenty of praise for how he is still improving us, and one of the biggest successes in his mind was how he has restored the bond between the team and the fans.
“The biggest thing for me, what Mikel’s done, is to reunite the fans with the team. The atmosphere at the Emirates over the years has been criticized, ‘It’s not the same as Highbury’ and it’s not this, it’s not that. It was toxic at one point, not that long ago, when he (Arteta) took over. So he’s done an amazing job to do that. Now you can see the fans before the game and hear them. We do a lot of comms and TV work at the games and you can feel it in the air and that’s been missing for a while. So he takes all the credit for that.”
Despite more disappointment in the 2024/25 campaign, our former right back does not believe that the bond has been damaged and he is backing Arteta to continue to kick on further next term, and hopefully get us over the line for the league and title win that we have all long been craving.
We all know where we have ultimately fallen down this year, as does Arteta with his own prior striker comments, so if we rectify that over the summer optimism will again be very high indeed.
Image Source: unsplash.com