Morning all.
A quick Friday blog for you as I’m heading to London today for this week’s glamour fixture with Brentford. I had been thinking yesterday about writing something about what beating Real Madrid means, or what it says about this team – but then Tim dropped his column yesterday and I kinda feel it’d be a bit redundant now. It’s here if you haven’t had a chance to read it already, and well worth your time as always.
It’s not exactly about that, but it’s very much in the ballpark of ‘Look how far we’ve come’. And I think it is worth considering. There is this strange dynamic in football where everything is assessed most acutely in the short-term, but the best way to impact that is by solid medium/long-term planning. You have to win games now, but you also have to put in place the structures that enable you to do that consistently, and that takes time.
Mikel Arteta has had time, and I think that’s a major reason why his team – even with injury and fitness issues – beat Real Madrid 3-0 on what was a night to remember. It’s a team filled with ‘his’ players, and a lot of money has been spent to get us to this point. Beyond the transfer fees though, there has clearly been a lot of work done to implement the culture Tim references Arteta talking about in his first press conference.
Sometimes you hear people say of a football team, ‘they are a serious outfit’, and that’s a term I would use about this iteration of Arsenal. Without casting any aspersions, I don’t think that’s true of teams that came before. Which isn’t to say people didn’t care, or weren’t dedicated, but I don’t think everyone was always pulling in the same direction, on and off the pitch. I remember Bernd Leno talking about how when he first arrived, Arteta’s instructions weren’t tactical, they were behavioural, and that’s so telling.
You need a certain kind of character to get to where Arsenal are right now, and just to be clear, we’re not exactly where we want to be yet. That’s top of the pile at the end of the season. We all know this. We didn’t have those guys then, or not enough of them anyway. Some people might laugh at this, but when I think about him, Granit Xhaka is a fascinating character in our recent history in the context of this cultural shift.
I think you can say there were times he was impetuous, perhaps a little too full-on, and he pretty quickly garnered a reputation among fans, among referees, and among pundits. He made mistakes, he got quite a lot of yellow cards. Arsene Wenger bought him, described him as a box to box midfielder, then changed his assessment of him more than once as time went by. There was confusion.
Unai Emery arrived, and without re-litigating the whole captaincy/Crystal Palace thing again, I don’t think the Spaniard was decisive enough and that played a part. There was that infamous game against Watford when we conceded over 30 shots on our goal. Xhaka came out afterwards and said the team were ‘scared’ and he was roundly pilloried for that, but the reality of what he was saying was lost in the furore: it was tacit criticism of Emery and the way he set his team up. He was right, in my opinion. They were scared, it was down to the former head coach who was losing his grip rather than just the players being meek and/or feeble (although there were some who played that day who wouldn’t last long when Arteta took over because he recognised that deficiency in them pretty quickly).
It wasn’t instant, but I don’t think it was any coincidence that when olive branches had been extended and Xhaka came back into the team, his best period in red and white came under Arteta. Whatever you think of his qualities as a player, he was a serious professional, the kind of character Arteta viewed as vital to his team’s development. I’ve said before I think the manager recognised some of himself in this player – a solid if mostly unspectacular midfielder who thrived in a mid/late career change of position.
Arteta saw Xhaka’s flaws when he played deep, so moved him forward. Don’t set people up to fail. And in those last two seasons, thereabouts, we got a version of Xhaka that became very important to the team. So much so it feels like Arteta has become perhaps a bit wedded to the idea of that kind of player in that position. You can pretty easily draw a through line between Xhaka, Kai Havertz, Declan Rice, and Mikel Merino who have all been brought in and played in the Swiss international’s position.
Xhaka left, went to Bayer Leverkeusen, and helped them achieve something remarkable in the Bundesliga. I don’t think he could have done that without Mikel Arteta’s positive influence, but at the same time Xhaka represented everything Arteta wanted in terms of character. He is/was a serious guy from the first moment he arrived, but when you look at this Arsenal team now you can see players with that same seriousness from front to back. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other personality attributes, no man is just one thing, but clowns and jesters are in short supply.
Some might argue there’s room for a maverick, a player whose instinctive qualities can raise the level at key moments. I get that, who wouldn’t want a bit of what a prime Alexis Sanchez, for example, could bring to this team? It’s not always that binary though. Even the other night we saw Declan Rice decide to go his own way with that first free kick when the set-piece coach had signalled for a different routine. I know he wasn’t exactly being a rebel, but it was a decision rooted in seriousness: the belief he could produce something special for his team, and boy did he.
I know this season has been up and down, a bit of a chore at times, and we don’t need to get into all the reasons why (there are too many!). For me though, I’ve never viewed a bit of regression as fatal, as the end of it all. You can learn a lot from adversity, Arteta has demonstrated that more than once during his time here, and as Tuesday night showed, there’s something so solid in the foundations that we were capable of that kind of performance and result against a team like Real Madrid.
We’re not where we want to be, we have things we have to do better, but we’re still good. A serious outfit, you might say.
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Right, I’ll leave it there for now. We’ll have a Brentford preview podcast for you on Patreon later, and let me remind you that for the month of April, we’re donating every single penny from Patreon to charity. You can see below the great causes we’re supporting, so if you fancy extra content as well as helping us give a bit back, you can sign up at patreon.com/arseblog. Thanks!
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— arseblog (@arseblog.com) April 3, 2025 at 3:08 PM
