Arsenal Running Out Of Time For Arteta

Let me just start by saying I was all for Mikel Arteta getting the Arsenal job a year ago despite his inexperience. I had had enough of Unai Emery and it seemed clear and obvious that the players felt more or less the same way. I thought Arteta could come in and galvanise the players he had as well as hopefully adding some quality to the team/squad.

The signs were encouraging at first and he even managed to deliver an FA Cup against the odds in a pandemic interrupted season. There were some negatives too such as the exit from the Europa League at the round of 32 despite winning the away leg of our tie against Olympiakos. Our eighth placed finish in the Premier League was forgiven thanks to that FA Cup win which brought us Europa League football yet again.

Some of the issues in the squad seemed to have been very well addressed with the arrivals of Gabriel Magalhaes and Thomas Partey and I think those two players will be crucial if we are going to improve. Partey has played very little so far thanks to injuries he has picked up while Gabriel has been our best central defender and he’s our third highest scorer in the league too. There have been other problems though and Arteta’s handling of some of them has been questionable at best.

First up there has been the issue of Mesut Ozil and Arteta’s decision to completely exclude him from the team this season. He is being paid an absolute fortune by the club and to get no return for that investment seems incredible. If we were doing well and making chances maybe it wouldn’t be such a thorn in Arteta’s side, but to exclude a player of his ability when we are missing exactly what he offers beggars belief.

As well as leaving Ozil completely out of the picture Arteta chose to send Matteo Guendouzi out on loan for disciplinary reasons. Our midfield is struggling really badly at the moment and despite his age and relative inexperience Guendouzi has to be a better option than some of the players who are keeping their places week after week. Things seem to be going pretty well for him at Hertha Berlin and I can’t help but feel the manager has handled the situation badly.

It looks to me like he chose his battles against those two players to possibly assert his authority, but he may have overplayed his hand. By cutting the two of them off completely it’s hard to believe he hasn’t hampered the team and his first priority has to be to the team. Surely the two of them could have a part to play in changing our fortunes if they were available and they couldn’t do any worse than some of the dross we have been served up recently.

In the final years of Arsene Wenger it was clear we were fading slowly but surely, but at least we were trying to play good football and managing to do so quite often too. That football got worse under Emery and it has become even worse again under Arteta.

We are absolutely awful to watch at the moment and coupled with a run of results which would get almost any manager sacked it seems like the outcome for Arteta is almost inevitable. We don’t have a style of play to talk about and we’re far to easy to keep out for opponents. I honestly cannot fathom how he wants the team to play and I don’t think the players have a clue either.

Too many players are just strolling through games and yet those same players don’t seem to pay a price as they’re in the team time after time. The only Premier League game where we looked better than the opposition was in our opening day 3-0 win away to Fulham and we have only taken 11 points from the 13 games since then. We are hovering just above the relegation zone with the teams below slowly but surely making up ground.

The question is whether Arteta can turn things around and I quite honestly believe it is beyond him at this stage. In his year in charge we have not come from behind to win a game in the Premier League which is a damning stat for him and the team. It shows his inability to change things when they aren’t going our way, but I suppose it’s difficult to change things when those things don’t really have a system anyway.

Our next league game is against Chelsea and after that there are four games in a row which have become almost must win games for us. With no disrespect to Brighton, West Brom, Newcastle and Crystal Palace we should be targeting 12 points from those four games, but my confidence in the team winning any of them is incredibly low. There’s a very real possibility of Arsenal dropping into the bottom three if they can’t turn things around very quickly and I just cannot see how Arteta can remain in the job if we are in the relegation zone.

As always I really want Arsenal to win every single game they play, but I cannot ever remember my confidence in them doing so being so low in over 50 years of supporting the club. Sometimes it’s a little easier to accept a poor style of football if the results are delivered, but we have the very worst combination of awful football and even worse results at the moment and I can’t see any other way to change other than bringing in a new manager. I know a new manager doesn’t guarantee better football or results, but as bad as these players might be there is absolutely no way Arteta is getting the best out of them.

Maybe I’m wrong and Arteta will turn things around, but I doubt it and even if he does there’s the small matter of the football we’re playing. It seems such a long time ago when teams came to the Emirates defending for their lives with their goalkeeper invariably getting the man of the match award as they put life and limb on the line to repel Arsenal. Now they come to our ground and take the game to us as they know we don’t have the wherewithal to take the game to them.

As bad as it got under Emery I don’t think it was anywhere near as bad as it is now. I dread having to watch Arsenal play  as I get virtually no enjoyment from watching them and I wish every single game wasn’t live on TV. Of course there have been worse times, but right now it’s very difficult to remember when those times were.

That’s it for today.

See you tomorrow.