Morning all.
There’s a little calm before the storm feeling about today, as we can relax just a little before another round of midweek fixtures. Everyone else plays on Wednesday, our game against Liverpool is on Thursday, so it does give Man City a chance to claw back some points.
They’ve had a bit of an injury blow with the news that Josko Gvardiol needs surgery on a fractured shinbone, and while I’m not going to sit here this morning and wish injury on an opposition player, when you’ve been through what we’ve been through this season and the absences we’ve had to contend with, I can’t muster any sympathy for them as a club. Just one injury to a key player? Luxury, back in my day etc etc. It looks like they’ll just go and buy Marc Guehi anyway, splash more cash, no big deal.
Meanwhile, I had to go and do a check this morning to see if Rio Ferdinand’s comments about how Mikel Arteta would consider the Man Utd job following the sacking of Ruben Amorim were true. It looks like they are, and in many ways that goes some way to explaining the mess United are in these days. This belief that Old Trafford is some irresistible temple of football may well have stemmed from the ‘glory days’ under Alex Ferguson, but that’s long gone.
Old Trafford is now the tenement building of stadiums, riddled with black mould, a leaking roof, and the whole thing needs to be re-plumbed and rewired. United are essentially the Tottenham of the north, the place where even good coaches go to die (metaphorically). The manager’s job there is a poisoned chalice where hapless ownership who turned the staff canteen into a literal soup kitchen, and unrealistic expectations, make it nigh on impossible for anyone to succeed. And the arrogance of Ferdinand to think Mikel Arteta would, even for a second, think about leaving Arsenal for that mess of a club right now tells you everything.
“This is Man Utd”, he might say. No. Point at a picture of a Roy Keane led team and say ‘That was Man Utd’, because back then they were a force. Back then they were a club it would be hard to say no to. Nowadays though, you can’t tempt a manager away from the Premier League leaders, least of all a man who has spent years painstakingly building this team into the powerhouse it is, by virtue of their past. An increasingly distant past too, I should say.
Ferdinand is blinded by the beer goggles of history. What he believes the stature of Man Utd to be right now and what it actually is are two very different things, and until there’s a greater acceptance of that from people like him, they’ll continue to flounder and stagnate. Which, by the way, I should make clear, would be very, very funny indeed.
Remember some years ago when Ralf Rangnick basically said the whole thing needed to be torn down and built up again, and everyone laughed at him because results weren’t that good when he was in charge on an interim basis? If he’s a last laugh kinda guy, he’s breaking his arse right now, I bet you. As for Ferdinand, his inability to see the reality of United’s situation now, and objectively assess the work Arteta has done at Arsenal, maybe he just forgot.
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Elsewhere, Declan Rice has backed Viktor Gyokeres and insists his presence up front, even if he’s not scoring as much as we’d might like, is a positive for the team. Citing the second goal against Bournemouth, he said:
Without him making that run from Gabi’s flick and holding it, setting it off to Martin, that goal wouldn’t happen. That was a pivotal moment in the game for us to turn the game on its head. Trust me, he’s doing unbelievably for us, we wouldn’t be where we are without him.
As I’ve said previously, I do think the spotlight being firmly trained on Gyokeres is normal. The entire conversation around Arsenal’s need for a striker meant that whoever we bought would be under the same scrutiny, and Mikel Arteta himself said last week the Swedish international had to deal with the noise. What’s also pretty clear to me is that there is room for improvement, and maybe the first half of this season has been tougher than expected because of integration, adaptation, and the lack of a real pre-season.
If, despite that, we’ve hit the midway point of the season (more or less) with a 6 point gap, my hope is that the second half of his campaign will be better, and more productive, and if that is the case then we stand a better chance of going the distance. I suspect there is nobody more unhappy with his numbers than Gyokeres himself, and what we absolutely know about him is that he is an incredibly driven individual, so fingers crossed that brings about greater end product.
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Right, I’ll leave it there for now. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, the Arsecast Extra is below, with discussion of the Bournemouth game, and some good chat around the situations of Ethan Nwaneri and Eberechi Eze right now. There’s also a fun episode of The 30 on Patreon, and a little later this morning, we’ll have an Arsenal Women Arsecast for you too.
Have a good one, folks.
