As we all know, the start of the season was Arsenal’s worst in half a century at least , and of course quite a lot of our reactionary fans simply thought that it was enough reason for Mikel Arteta to get the sack.
Some fans simply wouldn’t take any notice of the “excuses” of injuries, Covid and players having extended breaks because of the international tournaments, not to mention the fact that we played both Champions League finalists during that losing run!
Now we have done the opposite and WON three games in a row, Arteta explained how he persuaded his players to not get despondent with being bottom of the League.
The boss said on Arsenal.com: “What we did is try to explain to them what happened in the first three games, we missed nine, 10, 11 players that we could not select, they were out and the ones that were in had issues as well because they had Covid, they had injuries and we played the best two teams in the world, which you can see yesterday when they played each other.
“So we had to accept that we were bottom of the table, that was best to accept the reality, and go back to certain things we have to do better, believe in what we do, stick together and we were lucky because we had our people with us in a difficult moment, which in football is very rare to find. Then things started to get better.”
But we also lost to Brentford you say! Now that is where I am going to show you the massive difference between that opening game and yesterday’s North London Derby.
This was the team that kicked off against the Bees…..
Leno
Pablo Marí White Chambers Tierney
Xhaka Smith-Rowe Lokonga
Pépé Balogun
Martinelli
So how many of that XI started yesterday against Tottenham?
FOUR of them, that’s how many. Only White, Tierney, Xhaka and Smith-Rowe survived.
So, I put to you that Arteta was completely right that were extremely weakened in those first few games,
I would even go so far as to say that if Arteta was forced to play the team that started against Brentford in every game, then we probably would have lost to Norwich, Burnley and Tottenham as well!
Hopefully, we can keep most of our top players fit all season and only bring in the understudies when there are injuries or suspensions come into play.
Arteta finally gets to pick his best team, and hopefully we’ll carry on winning and get back to where we should be….