Claudius wrote:
RocktheCasbah wrote:
The point there being that we've got three excellent centre backs very comfortable playing as a three. As I believe we saw when building our attacks at Bournemouth last week.
Proper game changer.
There was a fair amount of consternation that he was over investing in defense in the past. It’s clear now why buying defenders was so important. They’re not just there for defending, they’re an integral part of the offense. I used to mention before that guys like Bellerin, Mustafi, Holdijg, Kolasinac etc were really hurting the offense. With the defense completely overhauled with ball players you see the impact. The team plays a higher line. The ball moves faster, and we are able to hit progressive passes all the way from the defenders. Helps us maintain possession, territory and intensity.
When people criticised Arteta for being defensive and buying too many defenders, they were missing the brilliance of the man. He was righting Wenger's mistakes by starting with the most fundamental building block which is the defence and then working from there. We would have got hammered like Emery's teams if he adopted a more expansive approach with the players he had, and he's slowly unshackled the team with the purchase of better defenders and forwards. That is the sign of a highly intelligent manager who is working with what he has, which is ironically one of the criticisms aimed at him.
My biggest takeaway from the documentary was that he's highly cognizant of what went wrong in the latter Wenger years. The need to change the culture, to have higher standards and discipline across the team. His ostracisation of Aubameyang only served to show, in my eyes, just how great a manager he will become. He risked his team's results and his job and didn't waver from his principles against the club's best player. I don't think the critics realise the magnitude of that decision and what it communicated to the players.
I'm not a fan of Arteta as much as I'm a fan of patience, supporting the manager, and giving him the funds to build a team in his own image. If you know anything about PL football, it's that its greatest ever manager succeeded on the back of patience and a chequebook, so I would like that extended to every incumbent. I'm so glad we did that with Arteta, because if the critics had their way, we'd be on manager number 4 post-Wenger, and these guys would most likely be hounding out the new guy already.
It's hilarious that the forum's darling Graham Potter joined Brighton in the same year that Arteta joined Arsenal. In his first two seasons, they finished 15th and 16th, and it was in his third season that they markedly improved and finished 9th. Which isn't all too different to our trajectory under Arteta with the double 8th finishes and 5th position last season, especially with regards to the time it takes to see real tangible change when you're transforming a team. Yet, people can be fairly objective in their analysis of Potter when there isn't any emotion involved but be completely unfair towards Arteta.