Arteta spoke to the press ahead of tomorrow’s match against Crystal Palace and as usual, said a lot and nothing at all.
As always, the full interview is on Arsenal dot com.
First, the big news: Roy Hodgson is going to retire. Arteta called him a legend and I think that’s just about right. You might not like his style of football and that’s fair but you cannot deny that he has a style of football and that it gets results. Palace are in for a bumpy ride without him at the helm next year.
And now the small news: no one is leaving the club, except David Luiz.
Ok, so that can’t possibly be true but that’s sort of what Arteta said: “Every player that is under contract is very likely to be here with us next season.” This was in the context of a question about Willian but it’s a sentiment he repeated about several players, including the on-loan players (Guendouzi, Maitland-Niles, Torreira, Saliba, Willock, and Mavropanos). It looks like the plan for this summer is to bring everyone back, evaluate them, see if they fit the positions Arteta wants people to play, and then cut the folks he doesn’t want and bring in new.
It’s not a surprise, is it? All managers pick and choose who they want to work with. If I were to guess, this is going to be a cruel, cruel summer for a lot of players.
What is a bit of a surprise is what he said about William Saliba:
on if William Saliba will now get a chance…
Again, when we finish the season, we will sit down. We’re still competing. We will sit down and discuss the roles of every member of the squad and how they can fulfil that role and he’s our player so he’ll be back here for sure. After that, we will make a decision based on the agreement of the role that each player is going to have in the squad.
on if William Saliba needed a loan move more than other players…
Yes. I would have liked for it to have happened at the start of the season. We had eight central defenders, which is unheard of, but we didn’t find the right moment, the right club, the right agreement to do that and in my opinion, we could have used those four or five months in a better way. We tried to maximise it when we decided to keep him here until December and now he’s had a run of games that he needed after the difficult year that he had in the previous season.
on if he’s been able to track his development…
Absolutely, but we still have great people doing that. Ben Knapper is always in contact with him. He’s the one creating every assessment. We are as a coaching staff, obviously following his progression, watching his games and in contact with him. It’s not an ideal world to feel that you still belong here and you can have a face-to-face relationship, but we try to do it in the best possible way.
It’s a bit more uncertain than I would have expected from a manager talking about a player we paid $30m for a few seasons ago. But this is the Arsenal and if we are good at anything lately it’s pissing money away. Torreira, Saliba, Ozil, Runnarson (I know it was a small deal but it’s just plain wasted money), and Willian are all bad deals.
On the Willian deal: I don’t care if Willian has 5 assists and 1 goal. He only had 8 matches this season where he had a goal-creating action and three of those were in the Europa League. That’s nowhere nearly good enough for a player we are paying 10m a year to. I’m not usually one to mention wages – because I think it’s a sucky thing to do – but this is just absurd. His non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per90 is down to 0.29.
But worse than that even is that he just no longer seems to want to take players on: his attempted dribbles are down from 2.98 to 1.41; his successful dribbles down from 2.15 to 0.77; his carries into the penalty area dropped from 2.01 to 0.71. I know that some of that is on Arteta and his system (which limits when players are allowed to dribble) but if he’s not creating goals, and he’s not even causing havoc in the opponent’s back line, you have to ask why we are paying him 10m a year and seriously ask why we aren’t playing a young player in there instead.
And back to Saliba, I haven’t a clue what’s going on with this player and this manager. All I know is that this feels like something is wrong. Maybe he’s not as good as we think? Maybe Arteta just doesn’t like him? Speculation. I guess we will see this summer.
You all know where I stand on this squad. I think we need five signings (backup LB and keeper, starting AM and CM, and replacement for Willian). Arteta also seems to have a set plan for this summer, he’s said so over and over again the last few weeks, and I believe it includes spending some money.
One question I get asked all the time is what I would do with Maitland-Niles and Willock. You know I’m a big fan of Willock – and wanted him to play for Arsenal in CM – but I’ve now seen him play quite a bit for Newcastle and I think this is the best time to sell him. I don’t think it’s weird to say that he’s saved their season with 5 goals in 5 consecutive matches: all against top quality opposition (Spurs, West Ham, Liverpool, Leicester, and Man City). But he is an unusual player in that he seems almost allergic to the ball in buildup play. That’s something I saw even when he played for us. He would often “drift out” of games and disappear. So I think now’s the time to sell. I hope that doesn’t come back to bite me.
Ainsley Maitland-Niles I would have sold years ago. He was played in a more forward MF role at West Brom and it was just, not good. Unfortunately, I think he’s a player who suffered from thinking he was something he isn’t (a MFer) and instead of throwing himself into the RB role and learning that inside and out, he’s stagnated as a player. Must sell for me because in another year, his value will drop.
Enough waffle from me for today. Speaking of.. I will have a bread recipe for you tomorrow. It’s the bomb!
Wait, is it a bread recipe? or a waffle recipe?
Not trying to start any trouble…(see e.g.: hotdogs are/are not sandwiches debate)
Just hungry for non-Arsenal discussion.
Bread but waffles are bread too, especially sourdough waffles.
Are waffles bread or cake?
The melee has been joined…
lol
Gooners
Y’all fight over everything, man 😅
he’s totally trying to start trouble!
Tee hee!! Me and England’s brave Harry Kane…
Arteta makes a persuasive point about the glut of central defenders (remember Mustafi?), but he plainly doesn’t rate Saliba. It happens. Not a single squad appearance between August and January? Not even against a lower league team in the other cup competition? Not even with the brutal schedule in December? Come on.
If he showed such bad judgement on an aging Willian, forgive me for being skeptical about the solidity of his assessment of Saliba. Saliba has played well at Nice, though he did get up to some naughty misadventure with some cell phone video.
Im intrigued by the notion that a new coach (and a rookie one at that) can come in cast aside expensively procured players, without trying to create or maximise value and work with them. Good coaches try to polish young players. At City, Pep can pretty much get who he considers the perfect player. Mikel has no such luxury. I do credit him with finally unlocking Pepe, but boy did that take some time.
Good observations on Willock, but a guy who can get you 10 goals a season from midfield is like hens’ teeth. I hear you, but I’d keep him. This is where a coach earns his badge. If Arteta is as good as people say he is, he’d help Willock round out his game.
Totally agree on AMN. But you know, I once went went for something that didnt suit me. Predictably, I wasnt as good as thought I’d be. But I could rest easy in the knowledge that I chased it, rather than keep beating up myself for not doing so. I hope that he possesses the requisite self-awareness. Good luck to him wherever he lands.
On board with trying for the brass ring. Self-belief is half the battle in attaining your goal. Don’t blame AMN in this context either. That said? I just wanted to play. Didn’t matter where. Once owned a left-handed Catcher’s mitt. Just to get in the lineup (‘Put me in Coach–‘ ♫).
AMN might be at that juncture and has to want to be in the lineup– wherever.
Use it– before you lose it.
About how good Arteta is developing young players started with the Sterling story, as Pep and City made grounds to push off their pet wart Arteta by making him look good. Besides that one there are no verifiable improvements made in players by Arteta. On the contrary we can only see Arteta destroying the confidence of players playing them all over the park , so ultimately they are masters of none. Then from the horse’s mouth Arteta admitted he did not play Martineli to curb his exuberance. On Saliba , there is only the youngster perplexed he was judged not good enough based on 2 cameo appearances.
Therefore nothing to prove Arteta improves players , but so much to show he is a nasty , maybe insecure individual.
Wow
I agree with you on pretty much all of this Tim. Slap a buy back clause on Willock and sell high. Great kid but destined for non possession style football and that’s not us. Same for AMN.
I like your shopping list too.
Also, do you secretly love Ace Of Base? I do. Ok now it’s not secret.
I wonder if Tim was actually thinking Bananarama. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ml3nyww80 Ace was a cover.
That said, Ace of Base is a deep, dark guilty pleasure of mine. Perhaps Arteta will see “The Sign” and bring Saliba back into the fold. For that matter, if Willian is truly thinking of heading out the door, I think we’d all tell him, “Don’t Turn Around.” OK, I will stop now.
Apologies to all – those songs will not leave your heads for a few weeks now.
I definitely thought Bananarama. But then I was a teen in the 80s that listened to New Wave.
Bananarama
Claudeivan good to see you around the last week or so, given the general state of the world I was a bit concerned.
Saliba was a fairly straightforward case no? He was injured for most of the previous season, had massive personal issues and was judged not to be ready, in either the body or the head, in comparison with the other 7 CBs. So loan him.
And then Edu’s team couldn’t sort out the loan, but that’s another matter.
I wouldn’t really expect Arteta to say anything concrete in public about Saliba’s future right now. We’ll see what emerges. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t feature next season, or if he goes out on loan again. If he does that would point towards poor recruitment rather than just bad timing, but right now it’s too soon to tell.
In general I’m not sure if Arteta’s supposed to be destroying young players by giving them too much responsibility, over-relying on them and overplaying them to the point of injury; or if he’s destroying them by not playing them at all, loaning them and arbitrarily stifling their careers.
Or maybe he’s destroying them by undermining their confidence, by playing them all over the pitch and demonstrating his confidence in them…wait…
Maybe it’s all of the above. But sometimes I feel like people are actively looking for reasons to get angry, and that is not a new feeling for me. Surely we should celebrate the development of players like Saka and ESR and hope that others like Balogun and Saliba fulfil their potential.
Other times we should also call out the mistakes when they are clear. For example Willian looks like a bad Arteta/Edu decision. Arteta was asking him to do a totally new job – to be a technically secure possession-master and link-up man, instead of the dribbly winger he was before. I get the idea, I like it, we gave it time (well, some of us did) and it hasn’t worked for the player. A lot of the criticism flung Willian’s way has been either unfair or premature, but the amount of wages tied up in what was basically an experiment have to now be freed up.
Ace of Bass, my God you should all be ashamed of yourselves 🙂
Greg knows.
And yes, they should be ashamed. SMH. 🙂
Deeply ashamed. That’s what guilty pleasures are for, dammit! Don’t tell me you don’t have yours. Come on – out with them, Lonestar and Greg.
On a road trip in 1993 I had to hear “All that she wants is another baby” on a loop for a six hour drive and I shiver at the memory.
Guilty pleasures? Iron Maiden and Helloween are terrible and hilarious and magnificent all at the same time. “More Than Words” by Extreme. I can play that and sing the harmonies, and I will do it at your next house party.
Not ashamed at all. Swedes make the best electronic music.