This Premier League season seems to be turning into the Arsenal version of Slumdog Millionaire, so scripted does Mikel Arteta’s path through the season seem to be.
In the Danny Boyle modern classic, a young man who somehow wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? is forced by police to explain how he, an 18-year-old from the slums, could possibly know all the answers.
It transpires, in cinematic flashback, that each question relates to a moment in his life that taught him the answer, and if Arteta finally wins the Premier League, he might feel his own journey to the title has been similarly serendipitous.
Before the international break, he overcame the manager whose stamp the Spanish boss might well have on the sole of one of his feet. After retiring in 2016, he turned down jobs at Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur to work under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. The pair’s shared football philosophy was on show two weeks ago at the Emirates as in a student-becomes-master moment worthy of any three-act film.
They did in fact first cross paths as teammates but it was later as coaches that they developed their “senpai and kohai” relationship. And Guardiola was not Arteta’s first teacher. That was Mauricio Pochettino.
Instead of Barcelona, the scene for these flashback is Paris, where Arteta moved on loan, unable to displace Xavi or Iniesta in the first team at Barca and unwilling to spend, in his own words, what he expected to be three years waiting to find his feet.
“I decided to go to Paris and play in the Champions League and maybe come back in two years,” Arteta said in a 2005 interview.
So it was that the then-18-year-old arrived at Paris Saint-Germain looking to give his career a jump-start. Unable to speak French – although he did quickly learn – he gravitated towards another new arrival and a Spanish speaker: Pochettino, who had also flown in from the city of Barcelona, signing from Espanyol. Initially, the two stayed in the same Parisian hotel and then lived nearby when they finally moved into more permanent accommodation.
Arteta was always marked by his coaches as an intelligent player, but he still needed someone to look up to, and while he has previously named then-PSG boss Luis Fernandez as one of his most influential managers, it is Pochettino who he holds up for special praise.
“I always said that for me he was like a football father,” Arteta said.
“He was always giving me advice, giving me confidence, coaching me and talking to me. He was really, really inspirational. Really supportive.
“That period was key in my career to be able to make it. I don’t think that, without him, I would have had the time that I had in Paris and the start of my professional career.
”He was critical, has been one of the most influential people in my career, firstly as a player, he took me under the arm and looked after me a little child, a little brother and he was a big part of the success I had in Paris.”
The respect was mutual.
“It does not surprise me what he is doing because he was a coach already at 17,” Pochettino said on Friday.
“Trust me, he was very good in his judgement. He is still really young, improving day by day, he can be one of the greatest managers in the world.”
When the pair were previously both working in London, Pochettino in charge at Tottenham and Arteta playing at Arsenal, they would cross no man’s land to meet for dinner. The Argentine was, as he always had been, a fountain of advice.
“Don’t go into coaching. It’s too hard!” Pochettino says he told his friend who is 10 years his junior.
“I knew he was going to be a coach. I followed him very closely. As a player he was a leader. I used to have him in my back and he was constantly coaching me.”
Like with Guardiola, there are obviously similarities between Pochettino and Arteta as managers: their intensity, their attention to detail, their personal connection with players.
Their teams are in, as Pochettino often puts it, “different moments”, with Arsenal a convincing part of the title race and Chelsea looking up enviously from 11th, with an inflated squad and no one quite sure what their best team is.
But Arteta is able to see the bigger picture.
“Now we are both managing great clubs in the best league in the world,” Arteta said. “It does not get much better than that.”
It is a Hollywood meeting amidst a Hollywood story. And like all good Hollywood stories, we hope there are plenty of sequels to come.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/EthZUR6
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