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Mikel Arteta: Top Of The Klopps

Makingtrax

Worships in the house of Wenger 🙏
Trusted ⭐

Country: England

Player:Saliba
For me Klopp is the one that got away! Wenger should have left a bit earlier and we could have gotten Klopp. I have no doubt about it. We would have been the club for him.
You used to post a different manager every week iirc. Lol.

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CaseUteinberger

Established Member

Country: Sweden
You used to post a different manager every week iirc. Lol.

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Colour me a proper weirdo wanting first Klopp (joined Liverpool Oct. 2015) then Pep (joined City Feb. 2016) in at that point of time. May 4th 2016 and we were 10 points behind Leicester and 3 behind Sp**s in the table. No way near a title challenge when every other top club was struggling. And this is the season you keep on dragging up post after post as we finished 2nd before conveniently leaving out the two following seasons.

PS. How the hell do you have the energy to trawl through my old posts from 6 years back? But thanks for doing it. I always sound very reasonable and measured. Grade A A-M posts one and all! :thumbsup:
 

CaseUteinberger

Established Member

Country: Sweden
PPS. @Makingtrax You were the one that wanted Arteta in, in the first place! I never wanted him as coach to start. If I recall I was lukewarm at best. Leave it too you find a post stating otherwise.
 

Makingtrax

Worships in the house of Wenger 🙏
Trusted ⭐

Country: England

Player:Saliba
Colour me a proper weirdo wanting first Klopp (joined Liverpool Oct. 2015) then Pep (joined City Feb. 2016) in at that point of time. May 4th 2016 and we were 10 points behind Leicester and 3 behind Sp**s in the table. No way near a title challenge when every other top club was struggling. And this is the season you keep on dragging up post after post as we finished 2nd before conveniently leaving out the two following seasons.

PS. How the hell do you have the energy to trawl through my old posts from 6 years back? But thanks for doing it. I always sound very reasonable and measured. Grade A A-M posts one and all! :thumbsup:
I remember all your posts mate. Must search for the one about wanting Owen Coyle. :lol:
 

samspade

"You said I said" detection expert at your service
I can’t lie, it’s cringy stuff. I hope Mikel doesn’t look like a prat all series.
 

Macho

In search of Pure Profit 💸
Dusted 🔻

Country: England
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By Nick Miller
2h ago

Arsenal are the willing subjects this time, following Manchester City, Juventus, Brazil and, of course, Tottenham in being stalked for a season by the Amazon cameras in the relentless name of content.

It’s sometimes quite difficult to figure out what the point of All Or Nothing is, certainly from the subjects’ perspective. Perhaps they serve a marketing purpose. Perhaps they allow global fans of the club more of an insight into what’s going on, to let them feel closer to the club than they otherwise would. Perhaps they’re not really for fans of that club at all, more for casual observers who just love fly-on-the-wall sports documentaries.

There are a few standard tropes within these series: tension is built with scenes of peril and dramatic music that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Christopher Nolan movie, but used to soundtrack a draw with Leicester. Adversity is built up then overcome to one extent or other. There are candid shots of players eating and chatting in the canteen. There is footage from training and from inside the dressing room. There are usually a few clips that go viral and/or become memes.

And there are usually a few — but only a few — moments that give some genuine insight into the inner workings of the club or its subjects.

In Arsenal’s version of All Or Nothing, most of those moments centre around Mikel Arteta.

The series follows Arsenal around in the 2021-22 season, the season when the trust everyone had been urged to place in “the process” was supposed to bear some sort of fruit. The problem in terms of dramatic tension is obviously that… well, you know what happens in the end.

So you have to look for something else, and in the three (out of nine) episodes seen by The Athletic ahead of its wider release, that “something else” is watching Arteta, how he works and specifically the “imaginative” pre-match motivational techniques he comes up with.

You’re often torn between wondering whether some of Arteta’s wackier ideas are genuinely interesting and novel ways of approaching things, or whether they’re utterly absurd schemes that would become memes if Brendan Rodgers did them.

In one interview, Arteta recalls an old Spanish coach who said that “players are numbers” and says he could never deal with his team like that, preferring to think of them as human beings. It then cuts to him sitting on a ball on the training pitch, talking to one of his players. It feels like the equivalent of those “cool” teachers who sat the wrong way around on a chair and called their students “man”.

There’s another bit from a pre-match team talk where he draws cartoons on a whiteboard of a brain and a heart, both with arms, legs and faces. In theory, it’s to illustrate the balance he wants between emotion and cold thought in his teams’ performances, but to the outside observer, it looks more like he’s workshopping doodles for a series of novelty birthday cards.

Before a game against Leicester, he arranges the whole squad in a circle, asks them to close their eyes and rub their hands together, then quite aggressively describes what he thinks is going to happen in the game and asks them to visualise it. “It’s obviously different,” Emile Smith Rowe told The Athletic at the documentary’s premiere. “Stuff we haven’t had before, but it’s all motivation — it gives us that energy to go out and perform.”

And then there’s his preparation for Arsenal’s trip to play Liverpool. Recalling his playing days and explaining that one of the few times he let his emotions get the better of him was at Anfield, Arteta says he wants to prepare his players for the intensity they may experience there.




His way of doing this is to set up a bunch of speakers around the training pitch and blast out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as they perform their exercises. The idea is to make them more used to the experience and thus more likely to cope and keep their emotions in check.

Alas, those with keen memories will recall that Arsenal not only lost the game 4-0, but also that Arteta quite explosively kicked off and had to be held back from launching himself at Jurgen Klopp on the touchline during the game. The imaginative motivational techniques can’t all be winners.

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Arteta loses his temper on the touchline at Anfield (Photo: Getty Images)
Some do work, though. Before the North London derby, the importance of which was ramped up by Arsenal starting the season so dreadfully, Arteta got the club photographer, Stuart MacFarlane, a 30-year employee and Arsenal fan, to address the players immediately before kick-off. He tells them how much the crowd loves them, just about holding back the tears, and whips the players into a frenzy.

For a manager to tell the players what the fans think is one thing, but to get an actual fan to do it is rather more effective. That one did pay off: Arsenal went 3-0 up inside 35 minutes and cruised to a win. “We had to make sure we did it for him,” said Smith Rowe. “All the lads love him. He knows how important he is to us.”

The documentary also shows moments where Arteta is genuinely inspirational. After Arsenal lost their first three games of the season, including an absolute pasting at Manchester City, morale was low and anger was high among fans, something the film does not hold back in emphasising. “This is the worst Arsenal team I’ve ever seen,” says one, while another is shown wearing a shirt with “Big 6 LOL” on the back.

Arteta talks about his emotional state at the time, saying that “difficult things happen in your mind” and asking himself “do I have the energy to turn things around?” There’s a short scene in which Josh Kroenke asks if he’s OK: Arteta’s voice says “yeah, good”, but his face says “no, bad”.


Then, before the next game, a week later against Norwich, Arteta talks to the players about what helped him get through those moments, ending by telling them: “This week, I have found the purpose of why I want to be a coach. Thank you so much, to all of you, because you made, in a difficult moment, the best week in my football career.”

A bit much? Maybe. But imagine how a player must feel after hearing that.

“It came out because I felt they were feeling so down,” Arteta said at the premiere. “ I could see the tension, frustration, fear — and I was feeling exactly the same way.

“Those are moments where you have to be yourself. You have to live it. You have to make it as natural as possible. It has to be you.”

Arteta comes across as slightly more warm and fuzzy than he can sometimes appear in the media, where he’s usually a pretty clipped presence, not a single hair out of place, staring at you with eyes that look almost too blue to be actually real.

It’s as if someone was charged with turning a football robot into a person but didn’t quite nail it with Pep Guardiola, turning the dial marked “Exhausting And Intolerable Intensity” up just a little too much with the Manchester City manager. Arteta is the next attempt, with a few more recognisable human qualities, while still retaining some of the computer-like elements of his old boss.

The players all seem to love him, though. Not that you would expect any of them to say “he’s a clown and we want him gone” when they have a microphone and camera stuck in front of them, but equally they don’t have to be as gushing as they are.

“From the moment he came in, I knew he was going to be a great manager — the detail he gives us…” says Bukayo Saka in the film. “He’s a freak,” offers Granit Xhaka, “but in a positive way — he sees details other coaches don’t.”

The problem is that we only get surface-level examples of what sort of detail they’re talking about. There are little bits, like his attempts to bring the shy left-back Nuno Tavares out of his shell, or a nice story about first meeting Smith Rowe, or a snippet of tactical insight at half-time of the defeat to Chelsea, but these are few and far between.

We also don’t get anything about some fairly big moments, like when Xhaka is sent off against City for a two-footed tackle. It’s probably not a big surprise that we don’t get all the gory details of the recriminations, but it’s entirely glossed over: for a “warts and all, behind the scenes” documentary to be fulfilling, that’s the sort of stuff the viewer (or this viewer, at least) wants. It’s the central flaw of these documentaries: you get a little bit, but not the stuff you really want.

Aside from Arteta, the other main takeaway from the documentary is a powerful yearning to be friends with Saka. This probably isn’t news to anyone, but Saka comes across as a sweet kid who went into the season in question after the most traumatic event of his — or possibly anyone’s — career: the Euro 2020 penalty shootout and the abuse he suffered afterwards.

Bukayo Saka Wall Arsenal


Saka’s niceness shines through in the documentary (Photo: Getty Images)
How he dealt with the aftermath isn’t gone into in any great detail, but there is a scene where he recounts going to the supermarket with his hood up and facemask on and still being recognised, with a queue of shop assistants lining up for a picture. You can see him trying to process how he is now mainstream famous rather than simply being football famous, and not being at all comfortable with it. “Before, I could still do normal things,” he says, “… but not now.”

But the whole thing could have just been nine episodes following Saka around, watching him be really nice, and it would provide gentle, wholesome entertainment. Six hours of him wistfully saying “imagine what it would be like scoring in a North London derby”, or talking about how he was going to get a cockapoo puppy, or discussing the merits of Thorpe Park (“It’s nice with your girl, bro”), or explaining to a baffled group of teammates what a maze is? Sign me up.

These documentaries always have an in-baked, central flaw in that they present themselves as showing us how everything works, how the footballing sausage is made. But they’re never going to give the full picture, never going to give us the real truth.

So we’re left with these small snatches of stuff you didn’t already know. Is that enough? That might depend on how much you care about Mikel Arteta’s cartoon drawing skills.

So glad and relieved James McNicholas didn't write this. Although now I'd like to see it to compare it to this piece.
 

Macho

In search of Pure Profit 💸
Dusted 🔻

Country: England
He is affable and courteous, but guarded. Shortly before we are due to meet the promised interview time is significantly cut down; not even my assurances that I’m an Arsenal season-ticket holder can persuade him to stay and open up. Perhaps it is out of shyness; perhaps a general distrust of the media (he regularly highlights media hostility toward him throughout the series).
Treat em mean keep em keen baybee gwan Mikel.
 

Riou

In The Winchester, Waiting For This To Blow Over

Country: Northern Ireland

Player:Gabriel
Was sort of looking forward to the doc, thought his speech ahead of the Norwich game was quite good.

But from the other quotes I have read from it, especially that clip of the training session...I really wish we never did this now.

As I thought, he just seems to be a bit of an awkward guy...which is no crime, not every manager has the charisma of Wenger.

But because he is that little bit awkward, it comes across as quite weird/cringe when he tries stuff like that...very Brendan Rodgers-esque.

Add this to the fact we ****ed up Champions League so badly, this is gonna be a bit of a disaster for us.

As good as the Jordan/Sunderland docs were, wish this never became a thing now.
 

BrianSwan

Member
I think Arteta will implement a much more possession orientated style this season.

Zinchenko and Saliba are very press resistent and great on the ball, Jesus will also press hard and win the ball back better than Lacca. I can see him trying to get the Guardiola/City style now
 

Legend14

Established Member
I don’t have an Anti Arteta agenda, tell me on what evidence do you base your opinion he has the chops for the job of that level? He was a disaster last year down the stretch and his thin squad botch job of Champions League after 2 years and money has in my opinion destroyed any basis to keep the guy.
I don’t have an Anti Arteta agenda, tell me on what evidence do you base your opinion he has the chops for the job of that level? He was a disaster last year down the stretch and his thin squad botch job of Champions League after 2 years and money has in my opinion destroyed any basis to keep the guy.
Not an Arteta fan, but I am not a heavy critic either. I have no passion to argue one way or the other, especially at the beginning of the season. He is not going anywhere and likely will make the champions league this season. Ping me if we return to 8th and I will gladly provide my opinion.
 
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