Arsenal are set to finish in their lowest position in the League since the pre-Wenger days, in 1995 in fact, when Stewart Houston was our manager (Who remembers him?) It has been a rollercoaster of a season, with three different managers, a global pandemic interrupting the season, and many unsettling rumours surrounding the team.
But now we have Mikel Arteta who is trying to steady the ship, and he will have a job on his hands to try and mold this squad back into a top team that can challenge for the Champions League places again.
But the Boss is relishing the challenge, as he told Arsenal.com: “I don’t think the league table lies at the end of the 10 months with 38 games. How long? Hopefully next season it will be very different.
“We have a beautiful challenge, a very demanding challenge but a beautiful challenge ahead of us. We have to get this right and bring this club back to where it belongs which is with the top teams in the country and in Europe. In order to do that we have to make a lot of good decisions.”
We can’t really blame Arteta for this season’s failings (maybe we could blame the Board for not appointing him 18 months earlier), but he was asked what he thought the reasons were for our awful season. He said: “Because we haven’t been consistent. Because we obviously had a lot of issues as well in the background, a lot of things that had happened.
“But at the end of the day, we weren’t good enough to be with the top teams. That’s not a lie and it shows the big room for improvement and the gap that is still there and has to be minimised really, really quickly in order to be in a good position to challenge those teams.
“It hurts so much. When I said it’s a beautiful challenge, and as well from my side, it’s to bring the club into those positions again. I know how difficult it’s going to be because you can see the other teams, what they’re doing, what they’ve been doing the last few seasons. The road and the direction we have to take in order to be quick in that transition… I’m very positive that we’re going to be able to do it.”
Well, it’s good to hearing him being so positive, but what the fans want to see is some of those “good decisions” being made ahead of the next campaign to give us all a lift.
One thing is for sure, we couldn’t end up having a worse season that this one. Or can we?