Arteta talks Saliba, I talk nonsense

Morning.

It’s a quiet enough Saturday. I was in town last night for some dinner, and Dublin is awash with people from Pittsburgh and Minnesota. There’s an NFL game in Croke Park on Sunday. I didn’t realise just how tribal these fans were. The vikings had their axes and lances, and the Pittsburgh folks had, quite unimaginatively in my opinion, steel bars.

“You suck!”, the Vikings cried.

“No. You are the ones that suck, oookay”, replied a man with the name Lundegaard on the back of his shirt. And then they’d descend into fierce violence while the locals all looked on with wry amusement.

Just to be clear. This didn’t happen at all. The NFL fans all seemed to be in good spirits, imbued with quite a lot of Guinness and perhaps some Beamish too, but one lot of them wore quite a lot of purple. I think it was the Steelers.

Update: Turns out it’s the Vikings.

I’ll be honest with you, I just don’t think purple is a good sport colour. Prince, yes. Burly wide-receiver, not so much. I don’t even know if wide-receivers are burly. I just assume they are because they’re NFL players and I credit all of them with a certain amount of burliness. But in comparison to the burliest of them, like the blocking dudes in the fake scrum thing, they’re probably not that burly at all.

I don’t know if these guys are particularly litigious, but just in case any of them are reading this now and feel like their physicality has been besmirched in any way: this is simply an uniformed observation that has no bearing on real life events. Any similarity to real-life burly, or non-burly, wide receivers, is entirely coincidental. For further clarification, please email ‘[email protected]‘

As you’ll have gathered, things are pretty quiet from an Arsenal perspective. Obviously we have a game on Sunday, but that’s not today, so there’s no sense talking about it now or I won’t have anything to write about tomorrow. Mikel Arteta did talk a little about William Saliba yesterday, after the news about his new contract emerged. Asked about the French international’s emergence as one of the best central defenders in the world, he said:

It’s very impressive what he’s done at his age because sometimes we tend to forget. But his consistency, I think, the way he’s progressed, I think the way he’s matured as well as a person and his role in the team has grown year after year. I think he’s built a partnership with Gabi especially, but also with the backline and the keeper that has the best defensive record in the last three years I think. He’s been pivotal to that.

And it is worth remembering he’s still only 24, and will remain 24 until he turns 25 because that’s how it works. The thing is though, from the time he broke through – when he was 21 – he has played like a 28 year old. Which is a hell of a trick really. In seriousness, we’ve seen lots of central defenders down the years who have lots of potential, but typically young defenders make mistakes. It’s normal. That’s how they learn.

Even look at how someone like Gabriel has developed over his time at the club. When he first arrived he was good, but a bit rash at times. He’s matured into an absolute colossus of a defender, a first name on the team sheet player for us and Brazil. There isn’t a single club in the world who would turn him down if he was offered to them. Saliba though, he was almost fully formed when he came into the Arsenal team, and despite some anxiety at the time, the loan spells were clearly a great idea.

On the one hand, we had to endure subpar alternatives for a while, but on the other when Saliba came back from his time at Nice and then Marseille, he was absolutely ready for the Premier League. Arteta said of those decisions:

Probably we had different expectations or ideas of how to create the best pathway for him to fulfil his potential. But I think at some point we got to the same conclusion, to the same line, and we started to work together. From there, with the help of all the coaches and players, everything started to flourish because it was clear that the potential was there. It was about timing and especially, in my opinion, creating the right environment and players for him to deliver what he could do.

As I said in yesterday’s blog, players like Saliba don’t sign on for their best years if they have any issue with the club or the manager. So, while there might have been a difference of opinion in the past, it wasn’t a case that Arteta hated Saliba, or Saliba hated Arteta. They were not like burly NFL fans in Dublin going at each other with a vengeance.

And on that particular callback, I’m going to leave it there, drink more coffee, and await the knock of a disgruntled fake scrum guy at my door. I won’t be wearing purple, that’s all I can tell you.

Newcastle preview podcast is on Patreon now too, if you need something to listen to this morning. Byeeeeee.