Arteta needs to look at himself by DN
Mikel Arteta may be the Arsenal captain, well I think he still is, but he was absolutely anonymous last night in the standard 67 minutes that Arsene Wenger gives his starters before taking off the deadwood. The stats analysts Squawka gave some damning figures for Mikel’s performance in the time he was on the pitch.
Mikel Arteta’s game by numbers:
0 chances created –
0 tackles won –
0 aerial duels won –
0 shots –
0 crosses…..
Ineffective. pic.twitter.com/iJWRqhFfFS — Squawka Football (@Squawka) September 16, 2015
But Arteta is of the opinion that the strikers (i.e. monsieur Giroud) should have put us at least two goals up before he got sent off. Arteta’s response on Arsenal.com was that the team that Wenger picked (including him) was good enough, but they just didn’t kill the game off: “We have so many games coming up. The manager said that he was going to make a few changes and I think that we were still good enough to compete with a Dinamo Zagreb side. We had the chances but we didn’t take them. The manager tried to create the best balance for the game but we didn’t make the most of it.”
So who do you think didn’t take the chances? And who created them, because it certainly wasn’t Arteta! He went on to say: “We go game by game. I think we created enough chances in the first 20 minutes to go one or 2-0 up. It was very disappointing to not be in that position. After Olivier’s sending off the game changed completely. We tried to get back but we couldn’t in the end.”
The problem is, like the Monaco game last year, the WHOLE team played like pants, but as always Giroud gets the blame. What about the defence which Arteta was supposed to be protecting?
Darren