The new Arsenal manager Unai Emery has impressed Ivan Gazidis immensely with his depth of knowledge about the whole Arsenal squad, and he already knows the strengths and weaknesses of the team, and even more specifically he knows how to get each individual to improve even further.
When Gazidis described Emery’s approach and knowledge, he spoke about Ainsley Maitland-Niles in particular. “What was really impressive was when you scratched the surface to go deeper and deeper and deeper,” he told Arsenal Player. “If we were speaking about one of our young players, if we targeted Ainsley Maitland-Niles for example, Unai knows Ainsley.
“He’s watched him, he’s familiar with his patterns of play, his capabilities, he’s very excited about his potential and was able to talk about how excited he was to work with Ainsley, to develop him as a player.
“Very specifically, when you asked the follow-up question and the follow-up question and the follow-up question, you’d get more and more depth about how exactly he would do that, exactly how him and his team would work with an individual player to develop them into the best player they can possibly be and also within the team dynamic.
“There are a lot of platitudes in the game of football, a lot, and people can speak at a surface level very easily to sound confident and impressive. What’s impressive to me is when you scratch through that and you get deeply involved in what exactly they mean.”
Ivan certainly makes Emery sound like a very thorough and hard-working coach and he will have his team around him to help get all the players improved. As long as the players take on board all the lessons that Emery and his coaches give them then we should be much improved next season even without any new arrivals….
Admin