Hello, I hope you’re all enjoying things as we enter the second week of Arsenal being champions. Let’s do a few quick Wednesday bits as there are some chaps coming to do some work on the house this morning.
Isn’t it a sign of how compelling and fulfilling the celebrations of the last week have been that I don’t think I’ve yet properly mentioned the big game coming up on Saturday evening. Arsenal are in the Champions League final for the only the second time in our history, and it’s been something of a sidebar. Obviously that will change over the coming days, but I think it tells you something about how much winning the Premier League meant to fans.
It was on an Arsecast Extra a few weeks ago where we had a question as to whether or not winning European football’s biggest trophy would be enough, if it was the case we didn’t go the distance in the Premier League. There’s no escaping the fact it would be a tremendous achievement, something we’ve never done before, and it would go down in history in that sense. Nevertheless, I think I said not winning the league would be a ‘profound disappointment’, and I stand by that.
Imagine missing out on all this. As I wrote yesterday, there was so much more to finishing top this season than finishing top this season. It was a culmination of years of experiences. Like popping the cork on a champagne bottle and letting those celebrations spray everywhere. Obviously it’s now purely a hypothetical because, and I don’t know if you know this, we’re champions, but as delighted as I would be with ‘just’ a Champions League trophy at the end of the season, I don’t think I would have been able to shed the disappointment at falling short in the league again.
I also think our chances of winning in Budapest on Saturday are significantly better having ended the Premier League season on top (by 7 points). It doesn’t mean the pressure is off, because you can’t play a game of this importance without pressure, but the idea that this would be an all-or-nothing encounter for our season wasn’t one I was particularly keen on. Now, we can go there on something of a high, and as Mikel Arteta said after the Selhurst Park celebrations, the plan is to try and use that feelgood factor when we face PSG. More on that game in the coming days.
Speaking of Arteta. I see he’s going to go on the Overlap with Ian Wright (yay) and Gary Neville (not so yay). I’ve seen interesting reaction from some fans about why he’d want do that, but I think it’s all right, and might actually be useful for him. To explain, I think there are managers out there who, after three second place finishes, would have a bit more to say after finally winning the league. Not settling scores, but Mikel Arteta gets a lot of criticism – quite a lot of it unjustified in my opinion – and there might have been a temptation to just snark back a bit.
Instead, he ensured his words were inclusive, saying:
I think this championship is about the we. And the reason everybody’s feeling like this is because they all feel part of this.
In a piece in The Athletic last week, I think Amy touched on how he is portrayed in the media, writing: External critics … have formed a caricature they choose not to see beyond, Arteta is not a manager they care to try to understand. He is simply an irritant for his “touchline antics” if he strays beyond his technical area, a joke magnet for cringeworthy ideas involving lightbulbs or music or catchphrases about boats and fire to make his players think or feel something important, and a cautious tactician who is ruining the beautiful game.
I think this is something few people have really cared to acknowledge. Generally speaking, for fans of other clubs and sections of the media, there’s a surface level idea of Mikel Arteta that is based almost entirely on the ‘caricature’ Amy mentions. He’s typecast in the minds of many who, and I can understand it to some extent, dislike the way he behaves on the touchline. Or at least use that as justification for their enmity.
The question for me has always been why is it so disagreeable when Arteta does it, but then it’s part of why people speak in hushed tones about Diego Simeone? I like it when this guy is passionate, but not this one! The big fun guy (who I like btw), Jurgen Klopp, literally pulled his hamstring celebrating a Liverpool goal by sprinting way out of his technical area. What’s good for some geese is not good for the gander. In part I think it’s because Arteta is a very serious guy, he is generally all business when he talks about the game, and that can be hard to connect with.
His press conferences are rarely ‘fun’, but he’s never disrespectful about other clubs, other players, other managers, or other fanbases. I think you could scrape through every one he’s done since he arrived in 2019, and beyond the occasional jibe about a refereeing decision (Desgracia-gate!), you’d struggle to find anything particularly contentious in anything he’s said. Pre-game or post-game. Other managers get booked way more frequently. Arsenal, for all the focus on set-piece scrapping, are not a dirty team. In fact, we’re top of the ‘fair play’ league with fewer cards than anyone else, having gone through an entire season without having a player sent off or conceding a penalty (I think it’s the first time any team has ever done that).
I think it would be more honest if people were open to the idea that it’s not necessarily Arteta himself, per se, but because they don’t like Arsenal generally and he’s made us good again. He’s responsible for something that irks them, and that’s fair enough. He’s the man at the top, so he is to ‘blame’. But in terms of what he says it’s hard to find fault with it, and his touchline/technical-area behaviour isn’t unique to him.
So, perhaps if there are people out there with an open mind, willing to see beyond the media and social media portrayals of him, going on the Overlap might be helpful. I don’t think he’s going to win the hearts and minds, but maybe they’ll see there’s more to him than they’ve been willing to so far. And at the very least, he himself will get to spend some quality time with Wrighty.
Ok, let’s leave it there for now. I’m off to Budapest early in the morning, so Andrew Allen will be on blog duty tomorrow. More from me on Friday.
