ARTETA ‘DO NOTHING’ STRATEGY FAILS ON BIGGEST STAGE

Arsenal, for the second season running, are whimpering out of a season at the wrong time. 3 draws in a row punctuated by a whooping at the hands of Manchester City.

You have to be able to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time here.

First thought, it is outrageous that a team as young as the one Arteta has is even in the conversation for the Premier League. There is a very specific reason serial winners like Jose Mourinho, Zidane, Carlo, and Conte don’t have really young starting 11s – because they aren’t experienced enough to win things. Older players, generally, are better players. They can manage big moments, they make sharper decisions, and they don’t make many mistakes. So for Arsenal to be where they are right now is a miracle.

Second idea or thought – Arsenal were really bad last night and it wasn’t good enough. If we’re totally honest, the run-in we’ve had has been really, really disappointing. We’ve now conceded 10 goals in the 6 Premier League games we’ve played without Saliba. We’ve lost two 2 goal leads. Our ability to control matches has gone off the rails. It’s felt like the leadership that was so strong at the start of the season has gone up in smoke.

Now, keeping both ideas in your mind at the same time – you could forgive Arsenal not having enough in the tank. But we’re in zero cups and we’re only missing 2 key players.

That is a dream-like scenario, except those two losses have meant Rob Holding has had to come to the rescue. It has been hard for fans to accept that he has been a major problem for our side. I am guilty of willing his performances to the highest of levels – and I was wrong. Our game has gone through death by 1000 dithers. Rob Holding’s impact has been less about major mistakes, but more about how our system is so high level, having someone with 10% less talent totally breaks it.

… but we’ve known that. Sky released data that suggested Rob Holding holds onto the ball too long, doesn’t show much ambition with his passes, and when he goes long he misses his target. FourFourTwo showed the world that Arsenal were playing 5 yards deeper because we were absorbing the lack of pace. Basically, heading into this game, a thousand cuts had delivered a massive gaping wound. It was clear as day that Pep was going to exploit the shit out of Holding if given a chance – but the logic said Arteta would know that and drop some galaxy brain move to keep him on his toes.

Arteta did not deliver. He instead chose to pretend nothing was wrong with our back 4. That was a killer oversight.

Before we get into this, it’s important to remember that Arteta has worked miracles to get us to where we are now – he is a world class coach and what he decides to do is up to him. We can’t be too downbeat about losing to a team that has been up to all sorts over the last 10 years. They have Haaland on a million euros a week. They have a shameful amount of charges levied against them for they have operated. There’s a high chance they’ll be relegated next season to send a message about their shenanigans. It baffles me that there isn’t a huge asterisks over what they are doing right now and I’m dumbfounded by the amount of Arsenal fans clapping what they’re doing.

But, none of that accounts for Mikel Arteta not changing things for the game and feeding Rob Holding to the wolves.

Pep’s tactics were hardly genius. He knew Rob Holding would drop deep, so he played everything through the middle. Haaland dropped deep, Rob would explode out of defence, KDB would nip in behind – time and time again.

It was painful to watch. It was his worst performance since Spurs when he last failed to handle a game. But we knew this would happen. It’s not his fault he’s not fast.

You can call this reaction kneejerk – but majority of Arsenal fans that weren’t lying to themselves knew exactly what was going to happen if we opted for Rob. The nature of elite-level football doesn’t care about your feelings on a really nice boy who plays guitar on the team bus. It’s ruthless in the real world and Arteta didn’t do enough to protect the baby goat on the chain pole from T-rex hiding in the bushes.

We had options before the game. I went over them extensively. My biggest annoyance is we also had options during the game. Why didn’t Arteta act when he saw the team flailing like a seagull stuck in a Kieran Tierney plastic bag? He just watched the massacre unfold when he could have thrown on Tierney to give us some central stability by allowing Ben White to come into the middle.

It was totally baffling.

Let’s be clear, no one played well, but this handwringing of other players is quite frustrating, because most of the lack of confidence emanated from the whole team knowing the weak link in the middle of the defence was going to ruin the evening.

Thomas Partey was poor, but you sensed he didn’t know whether to stick or twist because he knew what moving forward would invite behind him.

Granit Xhaka looked like a player recovering from illness because he was. If we could see he was having a shocker, why couldn’t Arteta?

We had Jorginho on the bench who would have allowed us to play out of the press and we had Trossard who could have come into the midfield to add more dynamism.

Why did Arteta wait until we were well and truly beaten before making changes?

I don’t mind losing a big game – but my hope was that we’d lose the game like a heavyweight in the 13th round of a slugfest. We lost like an amateur boxer going up against peak Mike Tyson. It was so brutal it felt unfair.

The only rationalization can fathom for that Arteta line-up is this: It was a 5D chess move to send a message to Stan K about summer finances.

Arteta knows this team will be successful for years to come.

He probably knew the title was beyond us.

He probably thought there was little chance of any defence beating City.

… so he rolled with Holding to say to ownership that we need to go the extra mile this summer to cement ourselves into the true elite of the elite.

Seems too petty to be a truth – but how can a manager that would roll with Xhaka in defence at the start of his Arsenal tenure not have a better idea than Rob Holding?

The real pain post-game is that we need to do some work on this very good squad. Something our fanbase isn’t good at doing is accepting that players you like might not have all the ingredients you need. We’ve had big debates over Bernd Leno exiting, and there’s been consternation about Pepe being sent on loan, some people have grumbled about Kieran Tierney.

There will be questions over this squad that people don’t want answer – Rob Holding can’t be near the squad next season. Aaron Ramsdale will need to kick up his levels; it’s all well and good keeping out worldies against Salah, but letting in soft near-post goals against City is really poor. He has too many lows in his game right now – not to mention his panic passing when things get rough.

Gabriel Jesus had his worst game in an Arsenal shirt yesterday – we love him, he’s made us better, but his goalscoring output has been poor this season. I had big twitter accounts subtweeting saying I didn’t get the game if I was criticising Gabi. People can virtue signal about their superior ball knowledge all they like when it comes to strikers – but the truth is, he was signed to score goals, and Arteta will have noticed that he’s gone missing in front of goal too many times this season. He’s not supposed to be our Firmino, he’s supposed to be good for 20+ goals. Our midfield, though brilliant at times, needs to get some freshness into it. We need at least Declan Rice and we need more competition for Martin Odegaard who went missing big time again in a big game.

This team has been electric this season – but 95 points needs more than that – and if we don’t have the tough conversations, we’ll never get there. As a fan base, we have to understand that we’re moving into a new era of upgrading already great players. Arteta will do that this summer – and maybe yesterday was his way of messaging that the spending hasn’t stopped yet.

So to tidy this all up – it was a poor evening, but it’s been a great campaign. We’re not technically out of it, but my concern now is that we don’t have enough confidence to win the rest of our games. If Holding can’t handle a City press, he has no chance against Newcastle away from home. But, keep it positive, we’re not guaranteed a place in Champions League. That was the objective of the season, we have done it. No more Spursday Night football for us!

Ok, check out the On The Whistle – big high 5 to the guy that said our On The Whistle podcast was reactionary in a review. Some people shouldn’t be allowed phones.