Good morning again! See what happens when I don’t have family responsibilities; I post every morning.
We had a few Arsenal things happening today. First is the warm weather training/bonding session Arsenal had in Arabia. Club photographer Stuart MacFarlane captured lots of warm smiles on the player’s faces as they went for a camel ride. Meanwhile, over on the player’s instagram accounts (which I do follow for some weird reason) they posted some more candid shots of the entertainment and dinner after. It’s Lucas’ Birthday by the way, and he posted something like 200 pictures of friends and family saying happy birthday.
Meanwhile, on the team bus David Luiz was honking noses. And Emi Martinez (or maybe it was Pablo Mari) got one back on David Luiz.
In a way it was exactly what I think this team needed. There was a lot of work done on the team’s tactics but also just some good old fashioned bonding. The new players needed to be integrated into the team and from the looks of things Soares and Torreira (along with Martinelli) seem to have formed a nice little pack while the three Spanish players (Bellerin, Ceballos, and Mari) also bonded.
It’s been a stressful 6 months at Arsenal. Players want to succeed. Players want to give the fans joy and excitement. And the way that we were playing football under Unai Emery was atrocious for everyone – to watch and to play.
The boys needed to blow off some steam but they also needed to work on some changes to the way that we played football and new manager Mikel Arteta worked them.
“It was like a mini pre-season,” Arteta said. “I wanted to use it to work on our principles and our styles of play, and as well how we live together. There are things I want to implement together as a group, not just for the players but for the staff as well. It has been really useful.”
I’ve seen some grousing among fans about Arteta only winning 1 of 7 League matches and I understand that – a little. But when he took over, Arsenal had won just one of their last 12 matches in all competitions. And the players looked like they had no clue how to play football. The quote from Arteta on that topic is quite revealing. Talking about what they are working on in camp he said, “It is our principle, our style of play and how we manage the games, how we manage each section of the pitch and clarity. That the players have clarity, that they know and they can recognise the scenarios they are facing and they have the tools for the solutions.”
These are professional footballers who have played hundreds of football matches over their careers. It sounds like they have been rubbled by Emery and Arteta has stepped in to start the rebuilding process.
In that context I think we need to give Arteta at least 8 games* before we start complaining.
The boys fly home now and get ready for the Newcastle match this weekend. My hope is that Arteta gets the guys moving in the right direction – namely forward!
And finally, some of you probably saw Unai Emery’s quotes. He lays the blame for his failures at the feet of the players, especially the stars. He also tries to claim that he stopped the rot at this club and says that basically Wenger’s Arsenal was collapsing when he took over. My only response to this is that objectively, by every known measure, Unai Emery took over Arsenal from Arsene Wenger’s worst ever season, and made Arsenal worse.
I saw some tweets that suggest he’s going to Valencia CF. Maybe this is uncouth of me but honestly if you attack Father Wenger and try to blame the players, I cannot wish you well in the future. I will, however, offer a prediction: Unai Emery will continue to fail as a manager. He won’t win trophies. He won’t make his next club better. He will continue to alienate star players. He will continue to dodge personal responsibility. And when he’s fired in 12 months time the fans at that club will not like him.
Sorry if that’s harsh, but that’s the pattern of his career so far and from the quotes I’m reading I don’t see any change in his personality from his disastrous time at Arsenal. Making mistakes is normal: steadily refusing to learn from those mistakes is unacceptable.
*I pray you can tell I’m kidding. 9 games is the most I will give him. Nine. Ok 10. BUT ELEVEN IS RIGHT OUT.
Willock wasn’t happy with Luiz’s joke – no bonding between those two.
He (Emery) also said we’ve not done better since he got fired. Only if he knew how bad he made us.
I considered Mr Emery to be a fraud due to the fact that what he said and what he did were often two diametrically opposed things. He’d say he wanted his teams to be “protagonists” and then set up in such a negative way, the opponents knew right away that the initiative was in their hands.
I also considered him to be a coward because during the thing with Ozil, he came out and said that his decision to bench the team’s playmaker was backed by the higher-ups, and there isn’t a manager worth his salt on this planet who passes the buck like that, dodges responsibility for events on the pitch like that, claims sporting results (his frakking job) were not really in his hands.
Since his decision to begin putting himself about in the press following his long-overdue sacking, these impressions of him have not changed. He starkly refuses to accept that anything he did had an impact on his woeful season and half in charge of one of the biggest clubs in the world. Instead, he’s blaming the players and making snide comments about the new coach’s record. He doesn’t talk about asking players to do things they weren’t suited for and how that affected their confidence. He doesn’t talk about sulkily refusing to play Lucas Torreira in his best position because he wanted Fabinho. When you compare this to Arsene’s dignified silence about Emery’s record even while watching the identity he’d imprinted on the club over 22 years being rapidly eroded, it’s night and day.
I often say that institutions are remarkably fragile, and are only as strong as the people responsible for them want them to be. Watching the ongoing shenanigans in the democratic West, from Brexit to Trump, only buttresses that. At Arsenal, we thought that the roots of the institution of The Arsenal were deep and solid, but we’ve gradually learned that they were only as deep and solid as the men in charge want them to be. The near-obliteration of our on-pitch identity as a football club by Mr Emery was enabled and overseen by Raul, Stan, and Josh. They even wanted to give him a new deal!
No wonder he feels bold enough to talk about the failings of the “star players” (whom he alienated) and the new coach (in his first job) battling to rebuild the confidence and cohesion of a team Mr Emery had all but destroyed through his utter incompetence.
Just something to consider. If Wenger created that identity, was it perfect, how successful was it, was there no place for it to be improved on? And if he’s gone, what remains of the identity? Who runs with it?
We should stop being so stuck on Wenger. His time came and went and a lot of us were responsible for him leaving.
And about the ozil thing, how is he shirking responsibility by saying even the higher ups agreed with HIS decision?
And did no one see the phrase “I obviously am partly responsible”. Which is how much responsibility you can actually carry when you’re only one cog in an overall bigger machine that runs on real life terms with real life consequences. I agree with your first complaint tho. He did set up too negatively and overly give initiative to the opponent. I felt it was an overreaction to the pressure of a big role at a big club in a more media intense league where everyone it seemed didn’t want him to succeed (fear perhaps that success would belittle Wenger’s last days). He became too cautious. But stylistically, his philosophy will work. Which is where I disagree with Tim. I think given the right mix of environment, players (he is not threatened by) and board support he’ll succeed (see 3 consecutive Europa league titles with Sevilla).
Feck it tho. Emery is gone too. All Hail Arteta.
nope. stylistically, his philosophy will not work. 3 consecutive cup finals means squat as there’s a whole lot of luck in cup competitions. you can have one bad play and that can be the end of your cup competition; the best team doesn’t always win a cup. two of arsenal’s last 3 cup competitions were in finals against teams so awful that they got relegated that same campaign; hull city and aston villa.
the truth of emery’s or any other’s philosophy is displayed by the league campaign. they show how consistent a manager can or can not be and the best team always wins the league. when you never even come close to competing for a proper league title, you find ways to fail to win a league when the odds are incredibly stacked in your favor, when you continually sow discontent amongst players senior, when you go an entire league campaign without an away win, the list goes on. bottom line, emery’s philosophy never has and never will produce championship football…unless he has an incredibly unfair advantage, ala psg.
I guess not winning the league with either Sevilla and Valencia is a crime when Real and Barca in their most dominant form are sat right there. And he did win one with PSG but let’s put that under the covers.
Emery? Emery… it sounds familiar. One of those thingies you find in the bin at a nail salon, no? All bent out of shape, but still a bit scratchy?
Good one, JV! I’m frankly bored of Emery, or is that Emery board?
Hey, at least we’ve learned Emery’s game is not all bad.
His attacking game…………inefficient
His pressing game…………..uncoordinated
His play out the back game……..easily disrupted
His defensive game………..chaotic
His blame game………WORLD CLASS!
He has his professional pride and his livelihood depends on his reputation so I can understand him wanting to offer counterarguments to the prevailing notion that everything was his fault, which is of course not true. What he says about Arsenal in steady decline when he took over rings true. We don’t need to rehash the mood in Wenger’s final few seasons in charge but it felt dour, hopeless, divided, declining. It’s easy to forget and maybe some of it was the bounce of the ball favoring us for a while, but virtually as soon as he got here Emery unlocked a style of play that was refreshing to watch and effective, peaking in that 4-2 comeback defeat of Tottenham. Everybody was on board at that point, with 20 games unbeaten and a famous win in the derby. Plus, his record against the top sides was quite good, the drubbing in Azerbaijan aside, and that was something Wenger never could figure out.
Emery’s system was effective when he had a full complement of specialist fullbacks to choose from. That position was key to his tactical plan and it was no accident that Arsenal’s form dramatically dipped with the loss of Hector Bellerin to long term injury. Throw in another long term injury to Holding, the passive-aggressive Ozil feud and the whole Erdogan situation, the legacy of Wenger’s long shadow in the very near rearview mirror, and a fanbase that expects champagne football and an absolute legend of the game at the helm and it was too much for him to overcome. For me his failure was not because he doesn’t understand football or that he’s a fraud. For me the primary missing ingredient was simply charisma. His players and his fans couldn’t believe in him because he could not inspire or instill belief when times got tough. In other words, his emotional intelligence (EQ) was sorely lacking, and that eventually spiraled to the point where it was untenable. I will say he handled himself with class while he was at Arsenal from the first day until the last day and he is understandably feeling stung by the narrative in the aftermath. Any of us would feel the same if we genuinely tried our best and it just didn’t work out for us.
Emery does himself no favours with comments like that. The fan reaction, if he ever finds himself back in Emirates Stadium coaching an opposing side, will be…interesting.
The lack of the so-called New Manager Bounce has made a few folks question Arteta already but those folks don’t know or appreciate how badly this side had been run-down. Plus we had those few games in-between where poor Freddie Llugberg was thrown to the wolves. Tim’s piece on Arseblog was clear: we are/were eye-wateringly bad and it will take a monumental effort to pull us out of our worst form of some 30 odd years.
This is real.
i absolutely love what arteta says, especially the “focus on principles” part. for me, any player over age eleven should be absolutely drilled in principles until it makes them want to throw up. in fairness, it’s the biggest obstacle when you have so many players from so many different backgrounds all trying to apply principles of play utilizing different techniques. i like that arteta is focusing on this; it forces players to think. likewise, as an aside, it’s the biggest impediment to soccer in the states. people think a talented player is automatically a good player. not so. i’ve played with players who were uber-talented but stupid. that stupidity limited how good they could be.
my take on the dubai pictures: i saw a bunch of cliques. the french were together, the spaniards together, the germans together, the south americans together, the english together. i hope arteta was mindful of that and integrate the players better than the pictures suggest.
as for emery, you guys have said it all. the lack of ownership for the shortcomings of the teams he managed says it all. any clown can try and blame others for all of their failures; look no further than the white house. i hope he doesn’t get the nod for a team like valencia, who’ve come so far to get back in the champions league in recent years, including picking up a couple of former gunners along the way.
stupid is an ugly word. it only applies when you have talented players who don’t feel the need to improve; players who believe their talent supersedes the principles of play. let’s refer to talented players who simply don’t know any better (like pepe) as naive, not stupid.
You hang with your friends and family whom I guess are sorta the same nationality as you are. The idea is that the cliques should not be cast in stone and instead more fluid.
I guess sometimes its hard to accept the truth. Emery was right. We had been on a downward path for Wenger’s last 2 seasons. We weren’t a perfect team. Players refused to accept responsibility and Emery leaving didnt change that. And he does not leave himself blameless but I guess no one read that part of the interview. We all need to stop the blame game and simply put the work in. Guess that’s what Arty has brought. Simple work on our principles. Emery has come and gone. I feel he has gotten an especially bad rap for just being Wenger’s successor. His work in no way diminishes or taints Wenger’s legacy. Yet his only season brought us a European final (we havent had one in a while) so while it would be satisfyíng to write him off, his work was not without it’s merits. In another life perhaps, he would not be so openly judged and put down against the accomplishments of a legend at a new club in a foreign country where he couldn’t say Good Evening just right. It still is, just football.
emery’s claim of being “partly responsible” is not authentic as it was only part of a sentence. the rest, he compares his 1 1/2 years at arsenals, not to mention other managerial jobs he’s had to arteta’s first managerial job after only two months. or he compares his time at arsenal to wenger’s worst season in more than two decades. is that a worthy comparison? seriously, does arsenal need a manager who sets the bar so low? what manager worth his salt claims to be “partly” responsible?
emery’s a fraud. sure, arsenal were on a downward slide when he took over but he’s wrong when he says he stopped the slide. he merely found a new way to expedite a new slide by having arsenal play some of the most abysmal football we’ve ever seen. it’s plain to see that arteta has stopped the emery slide. even the players have come out and declared he’s come in and made a positive difference. although the results haven’t manifest yet, you can see that arsenal are playing better football, the players don’t look confused or without direction, and players aren’t looking to abandon the obviously sinking ship that emery was captain of.
i don’t think emery is a bad football mind at all. however, to be a manager, you have to be able to effectively express your ideas to players, providing proper direction, purpose, and motivation to your charges. if you can’t do that, regardless of how smart you are, you simply aren’t suited to be a manager; maybe an assistant coach is a better option. your players have to believe in your philosophy and, after a while, it was clear that no one (players, fans, or board) believed in emery’s ability to lead arsenal.
I think what I’m trying to say in fewer words is that while Wenger came and improved upon it, We had an identity before him. Now he’s gone, we’ve got to put the hard miles in to find a new identity. It won’t be a betrayal of his values (which is all he left when he left) by instead a pimping of sorts. Building upon the bones he’d put in place. He wanted us to be a super club (an invincible?). Now we’ve got to find a way to make it true without him.
You’re not being in the least bit harsh on Emery. He deserves every brickbat. He managed to maintain a dignified silence for a few weeks but now he’s whining about what he clearly feels is unjust criticism from the players. He should have followed his predecessor’s example and maintained his silence. I bet AW could have made thousands by spilling the beans about his perception of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans in the year or two before his departure as the snakes jostled for position. One day he may reveal a fraction if he writes the long promised book. I suspect not though. Class is eternal.
Meanwhile, Emery was out of his depth at Arsenal, as he was at PSG. A small man suitable for a small role. That he was appointed speaks volumes about those on the appointment committee.
We can draw a line under that period. It was essential learning for the owner and many employees and supporters of the club. They all got to look over the precipice. Dire football, confused, unhappy players and relegation form. There is no divine right to success. Everyone has to give 100% and every piece in the jigsaw must fit.
In Mikel Arteta we have an ambitious young coach with a clear vision of what he wants. The club must support him financially to buy in the quality necessary to turn this club around and the support must show patience (!) and give him time to build the team he needs to deliver the goods.
I’ve seen the green shoots of recovery in the last half dozen games I’ve watched and am very hopeful we will see a further step forward with the work done in Dubai this past week.
Can’t compare what Emery and Wenger would do. Wenger spent 22 years here. This was his life, his love, his jewel. He’d do anything for Arsenal. Emery was our rebound boyfriend, suffering just for not being our ex.
And very many thanks Tim for the analysis you published on ArseblogNews. Excellent work. As a previous sceptic of the value of stats in the game I’ve watched for over 50 years, your work, and in particular, that piece has convinced me of its value. That piece nicely demonstrated why I’ve hated watching us play since 2018. The drive up the M4 is again becoming one of pleasant anticipation rather than feeling like a painful duty.
I get a bit lost with the identity thing. what is our identity? have we ever had one? Graham and Wenger were like chalk and cheese so the identity broke down when Arsene took over.
is it on the pitch or off the pitch? the selling of highbury,? the badge changing? the hill woods and the bracewells being edged out?
the managers? the players? it is all like a soap opera in some ways.
to me it just evolves and you cannot put a moment in time on how it was or should be.
Maybe identity is fluid and not cast in stone?
Emery was a Fraud sneaked in by Raul, the only guy interviewing who understood Spanish , and he did a sleight of hand using Arteta resume as Le Fraud’s . No wonder he tried to delay and avoid the sacking , hoping the easy game run will save Emery. It only made matters worse until it became impossible to come close to 4th
Emery didn’t just not have charisma, he lacked competence for the job. Maybe if he were a genius at tactics it would be enough, but the job is bigger than that.
Emery was arrogant enough to never once try and learn the culture of the club before changing/gutting it. He had thr catchphrases down pat, but he was either an outright liar or simply too weak. Probably both.
He didn’t do what he said he would. He picked fights with the players, and lacked the strength of his convictions even with that.
When all else failed he threw his players, his staff, and his predecessor under the bus to try to escape blame. A trait shared by the man who brought him in and wanted to reward his abject failure with a new contract.
The best thing Emery wittingly did was put his name to a classy farewell message. Once again it proved only empty words though.
I really dislike Emery. But every time he speaks, I can’t help but feel he’s doing more damage to his career. Who’d want to hire a man like that? Valencia you say? I guess being in some people’s good books can help with a job at a Mendes ‘owned’ club. I hope he gets a job and shuts up about Arsenal.