Morning all.
How was your Sunday? Did you watch the replays again? And again? I bet you did. With a game tomorrow, I bet the content team at arsenal.com will be working overtime to get us some ‘Bench Cam – Max Edition’ before the end of the day, but the reality of the week is that we have some serious business to attend to.
There’s a Champions League tie against Bayer Leverkusen which is in the balance, and then on Sunday the Carabao Cup final. For fans, we can let the emotion of Saturday evening ripple a little further than the players who have to put it to one side, and focus on winning the next game of football. Hard as that might be, because they’re only human, but it must also be something that Mikel Arteta will want to use. The next game is always the most important one, but you can use what happened previously in a positive way. If it’s a defeat, you get a chance to make up for it with extra determination and concentration; if it’s a win, you want to use the confidence and positive emotion that instills for the next performance. And when you win the way we did on Saturday, you must want to bottle that like some kind of elixir you can dispense as and when needed.
There must be so much for a manager to try and contend with. In general, I thought the Arsenal performance was better than against Brighton, let’s say, but if it had played out 0-0 I don’t think anyone could have said that was a major surprise based on how we’ve played at times this season. Part of what made the final stages so remarkable was, essentially, the element of surprise that comes with winning a game late. Maybe surprise is the wrong word, but the longer the clock ticks on and the fewer minutes that remain, the less chance there is of finding a breakthrough.
When it comes it’s positivity tinged with a huge dose of relief, and as much as he and we can revel in that, he’s got the job of making sure the next time we play, it’s a little less complicated. Not just for our blood pressure, but for his team. Arteta often talks about how moments like this are what makes football special, and he’s not wrong, but you can’t do that every week, and I’m sure some comfortable 3-0 wins, with all the goals coming in the first half, would be very welcome for him. It’s a results based business, as we hear so often, but to achieve those results, he has to look at the entire game against Everton, not just the last 8 minutes.
Those scenes of the players on the bench cascading onto the pitch to join in the celebrations were fantastic. To me it demonstrated a togetherness within the squad that is part of why we are where we are, and I think Arteta deserves credit for how he’s managed a big group of players. Some people turned their noses up at the idea of substitutes being called ‘finishers’, but no team has more goals from their bench this season than Arsenal. He wants everyone to feel involved, because you never know when someone might be needed, and it looks like that’s working very well.
At the same time though, he made a decision to leave a senior pro in Christian Norgaard out of the match-day squad in order to include Max Dowman on Saturday, and when it came to making an attacking change to try and help Arsenal win the game, he put the 16 year old on ahead of Gabriel Jesus. Ultimately, his instincts were correct, and I think we all know he’s someone who will make decisions in a ‘cold’ kind of way. It’s about who he thinks will give his team the best chance of winning a football match, but at the same time there’s some man management required.
I’m not saying either Norgaard or Jesus would cause any kind of problems, by the way. At this point of the season with so much to still potentially achieve, I think they’ll know their experience as senior players will be important, regardless of playing time, but let’s not overlook the fact there are probably uncomfortable/delicate conversations to be had. They’ll understand Arteta’s decisions, and I’m absolutely sure they’ll have been as happy for Dowman and the team as anyone else, but even if you get it, it hurts not to be involved and that’s part of what the manager has to contend with.
As I said though, for us as fans we can revel in the emotion of it all. The sense that a weekend that might have gone differently took a turn in a positive direction. If we were in a car chase in a movie, pursued by the relentless cops of Man City and heading towards a roadblock, we pulled off a handbrake turn, and whizzed down a side-street as they crashed into oncoming traffic. We haven’t fully escaped, but we put some daylight between us and our pursuers.
Right, I think I’ll leave it there for now. There is a press conference later, so we’ll wait and see what Mikel Arteta has to say about Saturday (again), but more importantly the job we have to do tomorrow evening. We’ll bring you the key stories over on Arseblog News.
Before that though, you can join myself and James for what promises to be a very fun Arsecast Extra. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com. So fire away using the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server. The pod should be out around midday.
For now, have a good one.
