It all started so well, opening Premier League wins against Fulham and West Ham and a victorious trip to Leicester in the League Cup. At that point in September Mikel Arteta was the coolest dude in a polar neck, knitting together a team as tidy as his designer clobber.
At least that is how it appeared. Or maybe we weren’t looking closely enough. Confirmation bias, swelled by Arteta’s FA Cup final success over Saturday’s opponents Chelsea, deadened our critical faculties.
Had we been paying attention we might have seen more in the laboured 2-1 victory over West Ham on match day two, and less in the 2-0 win at the King Power Stadium against a watered down Leicester line-up.
Four weeks later a more familiar Leicester ensemble would exact revenge at the Emirates in the Premier League, a result which added some contouring to our thinking after Arsenal’s successive away defeats at Liverpool and Manchester City. Arteta was still in credit, reinforced at this stage by results in a frictionless Europa League Group.
And then came the victory over Manchester United at Old Trafford. Narrow though it was, that win seemed to identify Arteta as the goods whilst exposing counterpart Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s unbearable lightness of being. Man against mouse; innocence cuffed by nouse.
If only.
Arsenal have not won a league game since, drawing two and losing five, including crushing home defeats to Aston Villa, Wolves and Burnley.
Tuesday’s lump hammer loss at home to Manchester City in the Carabao Cup quarter-final was a microcosm of Arteta’s lost plot. At least when Solskjaer was coughing up poor results, his analysis of the problems was in accord with what the supporters were seeing.
He called out his team if not individuals. He diagnosed rubbish but never spoke it. The same cannot be said of Arteta, whose observations are often at variance with the nose on his face.
Suddenly Arteta is looking exactly what he is, a management pup, a coach with no prior experience in a like leadership role. Each match now threatens a new reckoning, starting with Chelsea, hardly the Christmas present of his dreams.
Arteta is ultimately tasked with clearing out Arsene’s attic, a job that proved way beyond the capacity of his fellow Spaniard Unai Emery, and he had 14 years in some big chairs behind him before Arsenal called.
The inherited Mesut Ozil problem lingers without resolution. Whatever persuaded his predecessors to exile the toxic German, Arteta has bought into the aversion. Arteta might have created his own issue with the augmented contract granted Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Then again, who was to know Aubameyang would lose his appetite so soon after signing?
Ultimate responsibility for the failure of the post-Wenger project rests with the ownership and the choices they have made. If Emery was a forgivable blunder, the refusal of Stan Kroenke to meet Carlo Ancelotti’s terms covering remuneration and transfer budget in favour of an untried rookie is damning. It is one thing working at the shoulder of Pep Guardiola at a well-funded, fully evolved operation, and another trying sort the foundations at a club that needed underpinning with serious managerial heft.
Kroenke went for the cheaper option. And as the old saying goes, if you buy cheap you pay twice. Apologists for Arteta, led by Guardiola himself, insist the present predicament is not proof that Arteta was the wrong choice. And since the transformation was always a long term project, it would not make sense to act on short term prompts.
Conversely there is no guarantee that sticking by Arteta is the judicious move. It’s a punt either way because the bloke does not have a hinterland by which to judge.
The same can be said of his opposite number at Stamford Bridge. A year at second tier Derby hardly makes Frank Lampard a Jose Mourinho. The difference is Lampard is backed by Russian bullion and inherited a squad of greater depth.
Lampard has had his difficulties but is just two points off second, six off the Premier League summit and into the knockout stages of the Champions League.
Arteta could enter the New Year in the bottom three and monitoring Arsenal’s subsequent Europa League progress with a P45 in his pocket.
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