Mikel Arteta: Aston La Vista To The Title?

[bergholt]

Might be a new entry:

If he didn't get such good results then his whinging would get pretty tiresome

 

[samspade]

But (and I could be wrong) I can't see a world where Arteta does that, he's too attached to the left footer LCB and right footer RCB idea.

Only thing I’ll say is that it’s often suggest he copies the tactical ideas of those above him (which he may do). Pep and Klop each have an incredible right footed defender in the LCB role (vvd and Ruben dias), so maybe we could do that too.

 

[Sanchez11]

Might be a new entry:

fs

 

[Pyres7]

Don't think any combo without Gabriel would work, tbh.

Saliba, Tomi and Ben all seem quite quiet... Gabriel's more aggressive and vocal style, compliments Saliba's calmer and composed style perfectly.

Gabriel seems to be getting the Kos treatment now for some reason, were a good section of our fanbase wants to call him crap for some reason.

No CB is perfect, especially in this day and age... everyone makes errors now.

I'm a big fan of Gabriel but his level has dropped for a while. He should be more worried about Saliba's form than White right now.

It's nice to have a third CB that can genuinely challenge the starters for their places now.

 

[hydrofluoric acid]

Might be a new entry:

 

[Slug457]

Any top PL side has 40-50M CBs on the bench and not nailed on starters week in/week out. This is a positive.

Still dont think we've quite reached the Man City esc levels of being able to afford to have 50M players on bench imo, then again we've spent the most in Europe over a number of years now so perhaps your right

Again, as much as some try and spin it as people saying White played bad/White is bad, he's a decent PL CB, definitely not worth 50M in my view however and I think we'd be in a much healthier position if we'd had Saliba playing for us from last season on and invested the 50M in other areas of the team that desperately needed strengthening. I know guys will pull up YT clips of the few mistakes Saliba made last season to explain away why he was on loan, White also made mistakes including the own goal V Newcastle that cost us CL. Definitely will struggle keeping Saliba now as we've had him on a nothing contract for years well below his worth, whilst showing a unwillingness to even include him in our squads never mind play him.

Anyway, it's in the past now. Just need to push for top 3 as a top PL side should.

 

[Gooner416]

Still dont think we've quite reached the Man City esc levels of being able to afford to have 50M players on bench imo, then again we've spent the most in Europe over a number of years now so perhaps your right

Again, as much as some try and spin it as people saying White played bad/White is bad, he's a decent PL CB, definitely not worth 50M in my view however and I think we'd be in a much healthier position if we'd had Saliba playing for us from last season on and invested the 50M in other areas of the team that desperately needed strengthening. I know guys will pull up YT clips of the few mistakes Saliba made last season to explain away why he was on loan, White also made mistakes including the own goal V Newcastle that cost us CL. Definitely will struggle keeping Saliba now as we've had him on a nothing contract for years well below his worth, whilst showing a unwillingness to even include him in our squads never mind play him.

Anyway, it's in the past now. Just need to push for top 3 as a top PL side should.

I think we’d be in a much healthier position if we’d had Guendouzi playing for us last season instead of Elneny. You can always make this type of argument. I was also one who thought his fee was bloated and was gutted when he was given Saliba’s number.

That being said, Ben has been crucial to our build up play. He makes some mistakes but his passing range is imperative to Arteta’s ideas. I’d certainly have him over Rob Holding.

I think with a midfielder and winger we can push for top 3.

 

[Hunta]

 

[samspade]

The thing that’s stopping us from being an elite team is the midfield. When you sum up Partey + Ode’s inconsistent and Xhaka’s lack of mobility/turning ability, I think it’s easy to see that this is what’s stopping us from consistently dominating game after game. Maybe Lokongo, ESR, Vieira, and Ode can develop to help us out.

 

[Gunner D]

The thing that’s stopping us from being an elite team is the midfield. When you sum up Partey + Ode’s inconsistent and Xhaka’s lack of mobility/turning ability, I think it’s easy to see that this is what’s stopping us from consistently dominating game after game. Maybe Lokongo, ESR, Vieira, and Ode can develop to help us out.

Yeah if we bring in another decent midfielder and Vieira steps up to the plate, then I feel we can have a really good season. It’s the only position that’s a real weak link in the team.

 

[Sanchez11]

The thing that’s stopping us from being an elite team is the midfield. When you sum up Partey + Ode’s inconsistent and Xhaka’s lack of mobility/turning ability, I think it’s easy to see that this is what’s stopping us from consistently dominating game after game. Maybe Lokongo, ESR, Vieira, and Ode can develop to help us out.

100% major issue and still need an attacking player, then were good.

 

[lamby22]

Hands across the water and all that.

 

[Sanchez11]

Hands across the water and all that.

fs

 

[GDeep™]

Taking a break from here. All my bets stand btw. Just before I go, want to confirm my full support for Mick and the boys.

 

[Sanchez11]

Taking a break from here. All my bets stand btw. Just before I go, want to confirm my full support for Mick and the boys.

Just as things get interesting?

 

[BergMan]

Watch the bench cam. Arteta was not at all pleased that we sat back and ceded control of the game.
We are not doing this by design. We have a long way to go to play the total football that Arteta envisages for us.

 

[grange]

Taking a break from here. All my bets stand btw. Just before I go, want to confirm my full support for Mick and the boys.

 

[BigPoppaPump]

Spoiler: All Or Nothing: Arsenal – what the Amazon documentary tells us about Mikel Arteta

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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.

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.

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.

Is Gunnerblog is over the top with the Arteta arse licking? I'd think maybe he'd learn to be a bit more subtle about it but the guy is such a dork that he doesn't know how. I can tell he's a proper suck up.

 

[jones]

If the ringing endorsement of this decorated American netball player doesn't win Arsenal fans' hearts over I don't know what will.

 

[Tir Na Nog]

If the ringing endorsement of this decorated American netball player doesn't win Arsenal fans' hearts over I don't know what will.

What's funny is that he sent the message after we had already beaten Palace.