Mikel Arteta is obviously suffering from the loss to Villarreal and losing Arsenal’s last chance to get back into the Champions League next season, and he has had a heart-rendering interview on ESPN.
He has been telling us how much he has put into the job, and rueing the fact that it could easily have ended up 1-0 to Arsenal last night and everything would have been markedly different this morning.
But it simply didn’t happen and now he is doing some soul-searching. This is what he had to say: “I understand [fans’] concerns because when you are out of the Champions League for five years it is not just a casualty, it’s a trend,”
“There are facts to support that trend. So, there are things to change, that’s for sure because you no one is going to accept that at this football club. I am not going to accept that and the fans are not going to accept that. So we all have to push together to achieve something very different.”
“They are things to analyse more internally, I am sorry. We have done that. There are things that we cannot discuss here. I take full responsibility for my part, for sure, since I arrived here what I have tried to do, giving my life, my best ability, investing every drop of energy that I have emotionally to support everything that has been going around with my knowledge, with staff, with all the players that are trying to contribute with all the club to give our best.
“But so far it has not been enough and this when the question mark comes, why it is not enough? Is it just a thing? Is it the manager? Is it other stuff? What is it? And then this is football. Last night that ball goes in we win 1-0. You are in the final and it is a different world. But today that world doesn’t look very nice.”
“What I felt last night was a deep pain because the moment the club is in at the moment, with everything it has been through over the last months, I had a feeling that if we could take the team to the final, it could be a great turning point,”
“I felt that responsibility and I was so eager to achieve that because I knew it could be a defining moment. Not being able to achieve it, has been really tough personally obviously. I know that we have disappointed a lot of people as well, and that really hurts because we want to give the best to everybody but one thing I made clear is that to do what we want to do, I have no doubts that we are going to achieve it. If not, I wouldn’t be sat here.”
So Arteta is obviously taking things hard, but he obviously still believes that he can still make us successful in the future. I have no idea how he thinks he is going to do it, but I’m not going to kick him while he’s down. He has to face his demons and work out what exactly went wrong (again?) and let us all hope he can come up with a solution to our current pains….