Arteta, crumbles under pressure?: Page 15 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Arteta, crumbles under pressure?

Sicario2 - Tier 1

If we finished 2nd because City were too good I would have probably given it an 8.5/10 season.

But the way we crumbled it goes down to a 7/10 I think mate.

It’s not so much City being so good but we beat ourselves which is the most disappointing thing.

Only way to truly recover is be super cut throat with squad players and have a mega summer transfer wise. If we go into next season ‘1 or 2 players short’ like we normally do then expect more heartbreak next year.

Also, BIG pressure on Arteta next season. We must win silverware.

Burnwinter

Sicario2 - Tier 1 Only way to truly recover is be super cut throat with squad players and have a mega summer transfer wise.

Yeah we need to be looking at two starting quality centre mids, a left back and a right back, and ideally a couple more starters, one in attack and one in defence.

Xhaka needs to go, Zinchenko needs to be playing for his career, Partey's place needs to be challenged, Ben White needs to be spelled, and the leadership needs to be convincingly rebalanced to players of Ødegaard's age or younger, possibly Rice if we do lock him in.

Massive job to do for Edu, hope he's got his appetite.

JazzG

Going from being 5th and with most people not even giving us a chance at top 4 to finishing 2nd after leading for most of the season. This is a 7/10 season? I think some people need to step back from the keyboard, chill out and take stock of how far we have come this season.

City are on course to finish with 94 points, if that isn’t City being too good I’d love to fucking know when they have been good. We would have needed 95 points to win the title, that would among the top 5 or 6 highest point tallies EVER achieved in this league.

The end of the season we need to use it to fuel us, like we did last season. It will also give Arteta some much needed clarity on what needs to be done in the summer but I think he already knows.

Sicario2 - Tier 1

JazzG

We could have lost 4 times and still won the league. City are great blah blah but had we had a healthy lead during Feb they could have easily taken their eye off the league and go all in on CL.

I don’t see how it can anywhere above a 7 when we basically blew it. We won 2 out of our last 7 games in the most important part of the season. This is where seasons are defined, not winning in October.

I would go as far as saying this is the most disappointing season since 2008.

Burnwinter

Sicario2 - Tier 1 I would go as far as saying this is the most disappointing season since 2008.

I mean this line's a giveaway isn't it? As this implies, the better we do and the better our football, the more disappointed we are. So clearly we must have done really well (which we did).

If we'd fucked up the first half of our season but we were storming home with a 50 point second half, we'd all be incredibly excited about this team at the moment.

JazzG

Sicario2 - Tier 1 Sooner or later you need to wake up and face the reality infront of us, finishing with 95 points would have taken a near miracle for us, yes we were on course for that but our squad has fallen short. We have been punching above our weight all season. There is no point crying about that, it hurts for all of us. Everyone of us was dreaming but in the end our limitations have been exposed. Despite that we are on course of one of the highest point tallys we have ever achieved as a club.

Now we should sit back. analyse and this summer make sure we address as many of the problem as we can. We finally have a culture at the club where we try to be proactive about things and we need to continue with that. We are dealing with a club who has made 90+ points the norm to win the title. Look at the recent Liverpool team, that team should have had 4/5 Titles and instead finished with one.

You're also questioning Arteta if we won't win next year, mate you sound like some of these fucking loons on Twitter. He is the fucking reason we are even relevant again as a club and we are up against a fucking club which is essentially bankrolled by a oil rich country. Last summer could you have seen us challenging for the title? I would have said as a club we looked 3 years away and even that would have been a bit of a pipe dream and hoping that everything went to plan.

Gurgen

You are of course entitled to your opinion. However, you are completely wrong on every objective paramter.

Sicario2 - Tier 1

Gurgen

Football is not about facts and metrics, it’s about emotions. You remember how you feel at the end of the season, now how many points we got half way in the season. But let’s agree to disagree.

banduan

Gurgen You are of course entitled to your opinion. However, you are completely wrong on every objective paramter

Sicario2 - Tier 1 Football is not about facts and metrics, it’s about emotions.

then you are also wrong on every subjective parameter.

FEBravo

It's all about expectations. At the beginning of the season, everyone would have killed for a second spot by some distance behind City, Of course, having led most of the way with a big points gap (despite the games in hand) raised those expectations, and now disappointment is normal.

As others have said, it will be hard to follow next year with a similar season with CL etc., but that's why we play the games.

QuincyAbeyie

FEBravo well, not just expectations. Because expectations aren't necessarily where you think we should be able to be. For example, if I viewed Arteta as the worst manager in the world before the season and therefore expected us to finish 7th, but that our squad was capable of 3rd with a good manager, then finishing 3rd is way above expectations, but not where above we should be finishing.

Finishing above where you predicted before the season = happy is a very weird logic to me. If I misjudged all our players at the start of the season and they're actually much better than I thought, my expectations of them change throughout the season. I don't lock the expectations in before the first round.

That being said, it's been a very good season. I'm just not with you on the principle.

Edit: Looking at your post again, you might actually be saying the same thing. 😂

Sicario2 - Tier 1

Burnwinter
I get your point but football doesn’t work like that. The business end of the season is called the business end for a reason.

You can’t compare May with August.

QuincyAbeyie

Burnwinter If we'd fucked up the first half of our season but we were storming home with a 50 point second half, we'd all be incredibly excited about this team at the moment.

True, but that's also because it would speak better to our trajectory for next season.

goon

QuincyAbeyie

Not sure. I think the fact that we were realistically in a title race up until matchday 36 is more exciting for our prospects than storming away into second after a slow start, but never really being in a position to challenge City.

But optics aside, I'm very excited about our trajectory regardless. Being in a position to challenge for major trophies was never going to be a given, but thanks to the make up of the squad I think we'll have a few title/CL challenges and maybe even a win here and there for the next half decade at least.

Burnwinter

True, but no better than our actually existing 50 point first half spoke to our trajectory for the second half of this season, and yet here we are still whinging and moaning—partly as a result of how well we had done.

That 50 point half season was a massive achievement by this young side, I am going to remember it well. I'll even remember Granit Xhaka's involvement in it fondly.

It hasn't panned out the way we wanted, but no one can deny that Arteta and the players gave us a sighting of the gates of heaven.

Sicario2 - Tier 1

JazzG

Re Arteta. We’re Arsenal football club, if Arteta doesn’t win a trophy next year it’s the beginning of the end for him. Can’t go 4 years without one. Need to have standards. He’s not Arsene Wenger who can survive 9 years without a trophy because of prior achievements/cash in the bank.

It’s great he got us into this position but he’s not immune to criticism if he is the main reason we fucked up this healthy lead.

Don’t forget he sacrificed all the cups for the league. Was the risk worth the reward?

Man City are great but they been playing twice a week most of the season whilst we been playing once - need to factor that in.

If you’re a big club you need to deal with pressure/multiple tournaments/business end etc. This is Arsenal not Everton.

Burnwinter

JazzG I would have said as a club we looked 3 years away and even that would have been a bit of a pipe dream and hoping that everything went to plan.

This is it. Not only has Arteta "brought the plan forward ahead of schedule" as people like to say, he and Edu (and more distantly KSE and seemingly Josh Kroenke) have actually executed several stages of it like clockwork. That wasn't at all guaranteed. I don't love Arteta or think he's infallible but I'm not about to sit through a big summer of discontent about his methods.

GooneriC

We bottled it , we need to recover from that . We were going really well and then coming into April it seemed like everyone thought they could get at us.

Don Pacifico

Sicario2 - Tier 1 there's a lot to unpack in what you've written. Comparing us to Everton for a start, a team who have won a single trophy in the last 30 years is quite the hyperbole, to say the least.

And where do you get these arbitrary benchmarks of a trophy every four years from? In our history, we've won a trophy once every 5-6 years and in the last decade, the league has become way more competitive at the top-end, making winning trophies even harder. Trophies are what make fans happy but they aren't the only indicators of progress. So to suggest Arteta is a failure if we don't win one next season is frankly ludicrous.

That's not to say that Arteta is immune from criticism (has anyone said that?) but some of this melodrama is really just paranoid drivel.

goon

Sicario2 - Tier 1 Need to have standards

'We're Arsenal football club, we have standards' has always felt like a really weak argument for making any sort of decision. I said so back in the dark days under Arteta and it was a lot more credible back then when finishing 8th back to back, never mind after the longest sustained title challenge since we actually won it 19 years ago.

RocktheCasbah

Sicario2 - Tier 1 I'd have a lot more sympathy with this post had you not compared us to Everton who really only rival Spurs in the "embarrassing big club" stakes, or Manchester City weren't able to rotate Stones, Grealish, De Bruyne & Bernardo Silva out of their starting line up and win three zip away from home (they even gave Kalvin Phillips 2 minutes), but mainly if Arteta had actually "sacrificed the cups".

A big reason we're having this conversation this morning is that we lost Wilo & Tomi to season enders in the space of minutes against Porto. If Arteta was really sacrificing the cups, would he not have rested Saliba in particular?

You can talk and talk about how we've choked and it's not good enough and everything you say whenever something doesn't go our way, the fact of the matter is City, after years of doing this, have built a squad that is able to compete at the sharp end of the season - I think I heard on last week's Arsecast, their wage bill is £120m bigger than ours - and we haven't. The good news for us is that we can all see where the problems are and we have a manager and sporting director committed to getting us back to the business end for real. We're not looking at a manager who is going to to see what's happened this season and think "Oh, if I just sign a goalkeeper, that'll make the difference".

I get you're angry, as Jazz said above, we're all hurting right now and it sucks that the last few weeks have happened the way they have, but there's nothing any of us can do about it now. You can be glass half empty about it if you want, that's your right and I'm not here to tell you how to feel, but I don't think we should be reflecting on this season as anything other than a real step forward for the team.

I remember, just over a year ago, staggering away from the Emirates with James having watched Brighton do a similar job on us which looked like it was going to cost us Champions League football, which it kind of did in the end. Surely, you can't look at where we then and what we've done this season and not feel positive about the future?

(And yes, before you ask, I am also worried about how we have repeated the trick of falling to bits in April two years in a row)

Big Willie

Sicario2 - Tier 1 Don’t forget he sacrificed all the cups for the league. Was the risk worth the reward?

Didn't we do that last season and you said it was great that we sacrificed the cups as top 4 is more important than trophies?

Sicario2 - Tier 1

No worries @goon

Don Pacifico

What would be considered a good season next year? Top 4 and no trophies?

If we don’t challenge for the league next year but finish top 4 at the end of the season will we celebrate?

Just let me know how long you are planning to accept being ‘good but not good enough’.

Burnwinter

Sicario2 - Tier 1 What would be considered a good season next year? Top 4 and no trophies?

That's what we're getting this season, but it's palpably very different from 05–06, when we also got top 4 and no trophies. So don't play dumb and pretend every season that fits that description is the same.

To critique the current work being done at the club you would need to articulate a compelling alternative to Arteta and Edu's squad rebuild and the improvements it has brought to date, not just huff and puff.

Don Pacifico

Sicario2 - Tier 1 I think you judge each season on its own merits. We don't operate in a vacuum.

For next season, our squad is going to be stretched further than it was this year, so I'm prepared for our league performance to take a hit as a result. Top three would be nice (4th place acceptable), with a decent domestic cup run and reaching the knock-out stages of the CL.

But for what it's worth, when I was challenged last season by AAStyle about when should we be getting back into top four (again, in light of frustration with Arteta's progress...), I said this season and we've outperformed my expectations, so here's hoping we can do that again. 😉

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