How Arteta made Arsenal horrible again, with Tony Pulis tactic and gentle star turned into Diego Costa-style hate figure
BOTTLERS, chokers, shandy-drinking southern softies.
These were the charges levelled at Arsenal when they blew the title last season.
And even if the actual reason they failed was because William Saliba got injured and Rob Holding had to start, Mikel Arteta clearly took those accusations to heart.
If his team are not crowned champions next month, the Gunners boss has categorically ensured that they won’t go down being accused of nicey-niceyness.
Because, as well as being thrillingly entertaining and free-scoring when they want to be, this season’s Arsenal are also thoroughly horrible.
They are not here to make friends. They are not interested in being anybody’s second-favourite team.
And so, six days after stink-bombing the Etihad with a display of Mourinho-esque anti-football for a 0-0 draw, Arsenal turned up at the home of former bogey-team Brighton and s***housed their way to a thoroughly impressive 3-0 win.
How wonderful for the travelling Gooners to witness Ben White — against his former club — going down as if he’d taken a bullet to his neck when Brighton’s Pervis Estupinan brushed against him.
White is renowned as a gentle and decent bloke, intelligent enough to challenge the zeitgeist and claim there might be things in life other than football.
And yet suddenly he’s become some Diego Costa-style anti-hero hate figure, his wife goading the masses by posting social-media pictures of them playing a childish card game on a sun lounger after he’d refused an international call-up.
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A man supposedly so ‘woke’ that he refuses to play for England, even after Nike have turned the flag of St George purple.
Yet there he was — the big, bad wolf, cynically feigning injury against his old mates.
Then another former Seagull, Leandro Trossard, scored a gorgeous late third goal.
And the Belgian milked the applause of the travelling faithful in a Christ the Redeemer pose — even though etiquette dictates that a player who scores against his old club should go all coy with a performative non-celebration celebration to show the world how achingly ‘respectful’ he is.
There are no such niceties with this new beastie-boy Arsenal.
Earlier on, Gabriel Jesus had ‘won’ a penalty — which probably was a penalty but was definitely ‘won’.
I used to give Declan Rice compliments on the football pitch… I couldn’t help myself, says Troy Deeney
By Troy Deeney
THERE are certain people that you come across in football and you know instantly who they are, what they’re about and what the trajectory of their life is going to be.
Anyone who has worked or grown up with Declan Rice knows that he has always been destined for the top.
When he was at West Ham, he was a centre-half who played in midfield purely to help out and ended up excelling.
The way he used to listen and learn from his old captain Mark Noble and be a student of the game was second to none.
And because of that, whenever I interacted with him on a football pitch, I never felt the need to be disrespectful towards him because there was just a pure will to win.
We would tell each other to ‘do one’ every now and again but then I would get these weird moments when he would do something special and I couldn’t help but say, ‘Good touch, mate’.
He had this joyful atmosphere around him which you can see in all of his interviews, even now at Arsenal. You never see him get in trouble, being outlandish, but he has that jokey personality.
He is still quite kiddish at 25, yet with a very serious body and mind in terms of being the best player he can be.
When he was announced as England captain against Belgium, there was no outrage, no shock or surprise or, ‘Why him?’. It was more a sense of, ‘Yeah, that makes sense’.
There is no doubt in my mind that he is in line to take the armband for his country full-time after Harry Kane moves on, alongside his midfield partner Jude Bellingham.
Click here to read Troy Deeney’s column in full.
And in the dying minutes, with Arsenal 3-0 up, Arteta’s team celebrated defender Gabriel’s block as if it was a winning goal.
Arsenal head into the final seven games on top of the table, with the best defensive record in the Premier League, having also scored from more set-pieces than any other team. For Arteta, dirty work is next to godliness.
Apparently he goes around pinching his players in the gonads during training sessions because that’s what Diego Simeone does at Atletico Madrid.
Last month, Arteta took the unusual approach of admitting that he was coaching his players in what we are contractually obliged to refer to as ‘the dark arts’.
Even though the first rule of Dark Arts Club is supposedly: ‘You do not talk about Dark Arts Club.’
Arteta said: “Sometimes it comes from the culture of the club. There are clubs that have that in their DNA. It is not something that you would directly link with Arsenal, that’s for sure, but it is something that has to be developed.”
In truth, talk of a club’s ‘DNA’ is nonsense.
The Gunners were too soft and pure during Arsene Wenger’s latter years, but under George Graham’s ‘One-nil to the Arsenal’ regime, they were thoroughly disreputable and won two titles in three years.
Arteta has blended the best of Wenger’s purity and Graham’s malevolence.
Graham would never have signed the ethereal Kai Havertz, but Wenger would never have strung four centre-halves across the back for fear of looking like his old nemesis, ex-Stoke boss Tony Pulis.
Who knows whether Arsenal will win this enthralling three-horse title race from here.
They have a tougher run-in than City or Liverpool, especially with Tottenham and Manchester United as their final two away games.
But they won’t bottle it at Spurs, they won’t choke on their shandy at Old Trafford, they won’t end this season as runners-up with My Little Pony Club rosettes pinned to their lapels.
Because Arsenal are horrible again. Even Ben White is a villain.
And that might just be Arteta’s greatest triumph.
Harry ‘n Bell travel well
IT’S a very rare occurrence — an Englishman playing for a foreign club against an English team at the sharp end of Europe’s elite competition.
Kevin Keegan turned out for Hamburg against Nottingham Forest in the 1980 European Cup final.
As did Laurie Cunningham for Real Madrid against Liverpool the following year.
Steve McManaman was part of the Real team which KO’d Manchester United in an epic 2003 Champions League quarter- final, then David Beckham turned out for Real against United and Arsenal.
But in tonight’s quarter-finals, it will happen twice as Jude Bellingham faces Manchester City, while Harry Kane visits his old Arsenal mates with Bayern Munich.
We can titter all we like about Bayern failing to win the Bundesliga for the first time in 12 years as soon as Kane turned up in Bavaria — but his tally of 38 goals in 37 matches is staggering.
Meanwhile, Bellingham’s impact at Real — where he is about to win a league title — has been even more impressive.
As a rule, Englishmen didn’t travel abroad and if they did, it rarely turned out well.
So Kane and Bellingham ought to be respected and cherished, even if they end up leaving us without an English club in the semi-finals.
Playing false
WITH Erling Haaland not the abominable goal-monster of last season — and no authentic centre-forward tearing it up for the other title contenders — how excruciatingly hipster of me would it be to propose a Premier League Team of the Season, with two ‘false No 9s’?
But I haven’t got time for all that as I’m off to order muesli with crushed avocado.
WOLVES chairman Jeff Shi was right to publicly question whether VAR ‘is really what football wants or needs’ after Max Kilman’s late leveller against West Ham was controversially ruled out by the Stockley Park killjoy squad on Saturday.
Yet what Shi is probably more annoyed about is the unseen sub- section in the rulebook which states that VAR must always, always, f*** over Wolves.
SOMETIMES, though not often, the stats geeks tell us something that was already obvious.
Liverpool have missed 62 of what boffins officially record as ‘big chances’ — more than any other Premier League side this season.
Darwin Nunez has squandered 24 of them and if Jurgen Klopp’s side don’t win the title, then this — and not injuries — will be the chief reason why.
THE Premier League may be the world’s most unpredictable top flight but occasionally it goes exactly as expected.
Such as Sean Dyche’s Everton beating his old club Burnley 1-0 thanks to the messiest goal of the season.
MY mate, a very experienced football journalist, is adamant that Kobbie Mainoo shouldn’t start for England at this summer’s Euros.
And that’s the great thing about this ‘game of opinions’.
A man can cover football for 30-odd years and still be perfectly entitled to hold an opinion which is spectacularly wrong.