Well, happy good morning on this beautiful Friday.
Mikel Arteta dropped his big press conference and it didn’t really shed much light on anything new.
The match against Fulham is huge for him because it offers the chance to turn the page on a very depressing reality: Arsenal are losing Premier Leagues because we are not winning enough games that we should be winning.
We have been very good against the top six. Not quite great. But the low number of defeats in those ties is where you want to be. Mourinho was always in favor of NOT LOSING against the big dog side as he knew his flat-track bullies would dish out spankings to the under-funded minnows (including Arsenal).
Fulham FC? I have to hit them. Show them that last season was an aberration. A dream. A moment for their history books. A stain on our past.
We have plenty of options to get the job done. Marco Silva made some jokes about how deep our squad is.
‘No Madueke? They have Saka.”
He is right, and I suspect he is quite nervous about the type of Arsenal he will face tomorrow, because we have a very different offer.
The media has spent a lot of time trying to get under Arteta’s skin over the thinking behind signing Gyökeres. My opinion? He threw down the gauntlet a bit.
‘I told him before the first meeting that the nine I want is a nine and that if he doesn’t score for six or eight games he can handle that. If not, you have to go somewhere else because the pressure is off, the expectation will be there. So if you give Arsenal a number nine shirt you should be able to say: OK, six games, no scoring. I’m a different player, I’m starting to behave in a different way. I want a lot more of the same as what he does. Once we have those opportunities, we have to take advantage of them. I’m sure it will happen.’
These are certainly the moments that define players and their careers. He’s on his longest goal drought since his Coventry days, he’s currently part of an infamy story in Sweden and there are some really nasty voices in the Arsenal world wondering what he stands for.
Time to deliver. Big players get on that horse and ride off into the sunset. They score goals. They overcome their fears, nerves, doubts… and deliver results. He was signed for goals. Don’t run fast. Not because he left his girlfriend. Not because he has dreamy blue eyes with steely determination. Goals are a nine’s job. Take your focus away from there and you’re on a gaslighting mission that I can’t indulge in. In block 4 of the season the worm turns. This is the moment in the season where I deeply regret expressing doubts. Hopefully my turn in the kitchen will come. The humble pie is about to rise… let’s actually call it a soufflé, because pies don’t really rise. The humble soufflé is in the oven: will it rise, or will it fail like a MasterChef nightmare?
Who knows…but I’m craving Soufhumble.
We’ve been wondering all week what Arteta sees in Hincapié, well, we’ve gotten some answers.
“What you’re going to see is his aggression, his determination. He is a player who goes full throttle with every action, especially when defending. And with the ball, whether he plays as a left centre-back or as a wing-back, he is very clean on the ball. “Again, someone who really wants to penetrate, whether it’s with the ball, with his positioning, and that will bring a different character and emotion to the team.”
I read here “mean bastard” – is that what you got? He sounds like he comes with some of that South American fire that we all love to see. He’s an athlete, he’s fast, and he’ll give us unpredictability on the left side of the defense in the same way Timber gives it to us now. I’m VERY excited to see what he can bring to the table.
Arteta provided some injury updates: Ødegaard and Kai are doing well, and Zubimendi was rested based on the load he has faced in recent weeks. Another sign that Arteta is maturing. He listens to players, talks about the data and is quite open about how he leans into the team.
‘Lots of things. There have been two very different blocks. In the second block, due to some problems we had, we had to increase our availability in the team. That was one of the most important things to do. The impact that anyone in the match could have, whether he was playing or finishing, or whether he wasn’t even in the squad. I think we did that very, very well. And then we had a few more things that we wanted: to be more unpredictable, to threaten the opponent more, to also be super consistent in all defensive aspects of the game, and we went to another level. Can we keep many of these things and increase others in the next block? That’s the goal.’
Hearing him talk like that is like music to my ears. His biggest weakness as a coach is his lack of empathy regarding the workload… but he has been clearly told that the competition was lost last year due to availability, and that he has an important role to play in making sure things run smoothly this time.
We are the clear favorites for the league at the moment because we are at the top… but honestly, if Arteta has a deep enough squad and he keeps it fresh, I completely agree that we are the favourites.
Okay, enough of my ranting…jump into yesterday’s therapy session! X
#BLOCK #BEGINS