Two former captains, two ‘killer instincts’

Morning all.

Thanks to Andrew A for filling in yesterday. I wish I had a golf story as interesting as his this morning, but sadly I do not. I played pretty well yesterday, hit some lovely shots on a difficult course, and that made me happy. Which is pretty much all I want from the game. I will say this though – I would not have let Henry win.

Any sympathy I had for his tears would have been reserved for after the fact when I’d lifted the trophy. And then danced around him with the trophy, like I was Mikel Merino and he was a corner flag. I have that competitive spirit, I always want to win, whether it’s an important game of football or 5-a-side with the lads.

I do think that is something in-built, and if you have it, you’ll kinda do anything to ensure your team is the one that comes out on top. For me it explains quite a lot about why certain footballers do daft things in that pursuit. Not all of them, I should clarify. Some of them are just stupid wankers with violent tendencies who have no other way to express themselves, and that remains true even after they’ve stopped playing and set up their own pathetic podcasts.

However most of them just want to win. Win a tackle. Win a header. Win the battle with their opposite number. And ultimately win the game. Ahead of our trip to Sunderland tomorrow, there’s a lot of chat about the reunion with former Gunner Granit Xhaka, who is now captain there. He’s someone who had a lot of history with Arsenal fans, but without digging everything up all over again – because it’s been written and talked about so much – the Swiss international is one of those players for whom winning is everything.

What was unfortunate for him was that he wasn’t always in control of that desire. By his own admission he could be impetuous, made bad decisions on the pitch, and he wasn’t able to channel that competitive edge in a positive way. I also think it’s worth pointing out that when he arrived at Arsenal we were not in great shape. Again, without scratching at old wounds, the end of the Arsene Wenger era was a mess. Like seeing an old prize fighter stagger their way to retirement, far too easy for the younger fighters to land blow after blow. And then the Unai Emery period became an absolute shambles very quickly, and it was during that period of mismanagement – from both the Spaniard and at the very top of the club from owners to executives – that Xhaka’s low point arrived.

I don’t think that’s coincidence in any way. If you want to win, and you’re at a football club that has no serious interest in making that happen, it surely gets frustrating, and if you can’t manage that frustration it leads to blow-ups. Which isn’t to make excuses for him, but to my mind it explains it. Mikel Arteta’s arrival gave the club structure, as Xhaka told The Athletic (€) this week:

I will never forget the first day Mikel came in. At the training ground, we had a big room and there were some chairs in there, but the chairs were everywhere — chaos. He took all the people who were working in the building into this room and said: ‘Guys, from the outside, you look like this. Chaos’. So everyone takes a chair and puts it in the right place and he says: ‘I want you to be like this every day’.

You think ‘wow’, he’s started already with these standards — the first day.

Some people scoff at some of Arteta’s methods, but as Tim Stillman often says, they are not aimed at me or you, they’re aimed at 20-something footballers as a means to connect effectively with them. And he does that very well, as the results have demonstrated over the last numbers of years.

And with structure came the best we saw of Granit Xhaka. Arteta changed his position, got more out of him on the pitch, and also impacted him as a person:

When Mikel came, he changed me completely — as a human being, on the pitch, outside the pitch. I was 26, 27. Maybe at 26, 27, you have some people who are more mature, maybe I wasn’t — not every day, let’s say that. I didn’t have doubts about myself, about the quality, about how professional I needed to be — because I was — but there were these little mistakes, yellow cards, red cards. Silly red cards, where you don’t need to, but Mikel, he changed it.

I’m sure lots of footballers would describe themselves as winners, and that’s the beauty of the game. You get to scratch that itch quite often, sometimes two or three times a week. It’s a rare group though that can show off the medals that come with the best kind of winning – trophies and titles and all the rest. I don’t think a Granit Xhaka who leaves Arsenal in 2019 goes on to achieve what did at Bayer Leverkusen, regardless of his mindset. Sometimes you need someone to channel that in the right way, and provide the environment for the best version of yourself to flourish, and for a few years under Arteta, Xhaka had that.

He’ll face Arsenal determined to help his team to the right result tomorrow. That’s not any kind of disrespect to Arsenal, it’s just who he is. And he’ll face a team managed by a man he knows well, who he knows wants to win just as much. He left Arsenal on good terms, and I was glad of that because for me – despite his flaws – Xhaka was one of the few who actually really cared during those bad times and that was the source of his frustration/’bad’ behaviour.

I’ve said it before, but the criticism he got for saying the team was ‘scared’ after that god-awful game against Watford missed the point entirely. He wasn’t hiding behind the sofa, he was sticking his head above the parapet to tell the world that this was the effect of Unai Emery’s coaching/management. Ultimately, I think he was proved right in that regard.

So, I’m happy it turned around for him and he played a part in things turning around for Arsenal. Tomorrow though, I hope he’s crying like Henry the golf lad at the final whistle because I want us to win far more than I want any opposition player to be even vaguely satisfied.

I’m sure Mikel Arteta will have questions about the Xhaka thing at his press conference later, and we’ll cover those on Arseblog News later. And for reaction to that, a look ahead to the Sunderland game, and lots more, we’ll have a preview podcast on Patreon later this afternoon. For some extra reading this morning, here’s Tim on the aforementioned Mikel Merino.

For now, have a good one.