Morning all.
After looking a bit fraught in his post-game interview after Wolves on Wednesday night (understandably so), Mikel Arteta cut a much more relaxed figure at his press conference yesterday. Ahead of a game like the North London derby, it’s probably best to transmit that kind of energy because the game itself has the potential to be mental.
I don’t know if funny is the right word, but I did wonder how you get a message onto the pitch for your players to calm down when you’re highly agitated on the touchline (again, understandably so), and your coaching staff are too. At one point, Arteta had to grab Nicolas Jover and turn him back towards the bench, and Gabriel Heinze always looks like a man who could take exception to any tiny thing at any given moment. He’s like the classic ‘Are you looking at my girlfriend?’ guy, and when you say no, he replies with ‘So you’re saying she’s ugly?!’.
We need to take a breath and ensure that, while that result was absolutely terrible and completely indefensible, it doesn’t get under our skin. Football is a mad game, we endured some madness on Wednesday, but there are 11 games to go and the only thing we can do is focus on those.
Arteta says:
We have a long season. Chapter 27 says, okay, we draw against Wolves in this manner. What I’m very interested in is the next one, it’s what we are made of. What do we do about this and how we write our own destiny from here and going forward? You have to react to that because life moves on, the result has to stay, unfortunate as it was. There is nothing that we can do, what we can do is a lot, it’s what’s going to happen next.
You can’t change the past, but you can do something about the future. Not in a time machine way, but you know what I mean. The players have, reportedly, had a team meeting, which I don’t think is out of the ordinary, by the way, but perhaps a necessity to clear the air after Wolves. You could see, even after the first goal go in, a level of emotional reaction that demonstrates clearly how much they care, but perhaps also that it’s something they need to get on top of. I want them to care, I know they care, but at the end some of them looked like they’d lost their composure a bit and we need them to find it again and channel that other energy in the right way.
It’s history now, but those of a certain vintage will recall a famous team meeting in the 97-98 season after we’d lost at home to Blackburn in December. It might have been in Tony Adams’ book, but he told Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit they needed to give the back four more protection, some home truths were spoken, and we all know how that season ended up. The context here is obviously different. Then it was about keeping pace with the league leaders and ultimately overtaking them; this time it’s about us protecting our lead and hopefully extending it, but fingers crossed the impact is the same.
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Elsewhere, it’s being reported that the club’s Technical Director, James Ellis, has left the club after just 7 months in the role. Things have changed internally quite a bit since the arrival of Andrea Berta as Sporting Director, and Ellis was, apparently, dealing more in Academy matters with the Italian focusing on the first team elements. Quite what has changed remains unclear, maybe Berta now feels like the Academy should be part of his remit, but with Per Mertesacker set for a summer departure, there’s going to be some work required to restructure things in that department.
Let’s see what happens there.
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Finally for today, I can’t recommend highly enough that you find a few minutes to watch the video below from Vincent Kompany. He spoke about the racist abuse aimed at Vinicius Jr in midweek, and the appalling reaction to it from Jose Mourinho. He speaks eloquently, and with real craft about what happened, and that response from the now Benfica manager.
At a time when racists and bigots feel increasingly emboldened to spout their vitriol in the public and political arena, we need things like this. But let’s not also forget that we, as ‘ordinary’ people, have a duty to counter and reject overt and unacceptable language and attitudes, whether it’s on the football or anywhere else.
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Right, I’m gonna leave it there for now. Obviously we’ll look ahead more closely to the game in tomorrow’s blog, but if you need something to listen to today, we’ll have a preview podcast on Patreon a little later on this morning. There’s plenty to discuss, lots to talk about, so come join us if you’re not on board already!
Have a good one folks, look after each other.