I think the idea of ‘bottle’ being the trait of a manager or players is absurd personally.
There are tangible reasons why teams bottle it, all you need to do to understand why is just rephrase it to ‘confidence’.
One is that they’ve never done it before. When the pressure hits, how do you know you can see it through?
Well it helps that you’re playing great football. But what happens if you lose a key player to injury? What happens if teams spot a weakness? What happens if you’re conceding chances? What happens if you’re mentally and physically tired? You stop playing with confidecen, you stop playing with freedom and you start second guessing everything.
Arteta could have mitigated some of this by trusting his backups more, regardless or whether or not it would have worked. But the real answer to becoming more resilient, or part of it, is improving the squad. More options and quality, for rotation, to change things up and for Arteta to trust. The other half of it is that we will also get better just by experiencing more title challenges. The more familiar it is the more confident you’ll be.
I don’t buy it that this will simply keep happening because of some inherent quality we possess.
