I'd say Arteta showed promising signs of wanting to innovate this season. But then a relatively normal level of misfortune has too readily discouraged him.
Let me try to boil it down. If I were Saka, Martinelli, Ødegaard or Jesus in our line-up, I might feel a bit burnt out. In every match, there's a multitude of automatisms I have to work out to perfection off the ball, before I even think about creating goals. Arsenal's multi-stage press requires the mental effort of a piano recital or physics exam, as a football watcher I can barely grasp a step by step written analysis of it.
Once that initial burden is attended to—the requirements of Controlball™ that are set in stone to the extent a player will get hooked, bollocksed at half time or even frozen out of the squad if he doesn't execute them—I'll further know that I have to start running those same channels and zones in the same starting position when we're on the ball, looking for the same cutbacks or back post runs, scraping out the same marginal shooting opportunities creeping across the top of the opposition penalty area, every time we play.
If it works, fucking great. We look like an unstoppable doomsday machine. Conversely if it doesn't work, it's a lot of shit to shovel without a lot of joy for our boys from doing it. We have the steel we need. It's time to add a bit of mercury.
