Emery needs until 2020 before his true vision for Arsenal becomes reality
JUST as the rest of us couldn’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse overnight, neither can Unai Emery turn Arsenal into a side with leadership, bottle, fight and spirit in one transfer window.
He needs three at least and even then will have to hope his new players gel quickly and hit the ground running.
What a manager can do in a short space of time is transplant talent into a team.
He can’t transplant heart, competitiveness, desire and a passion to win, all of which Arsenal have been missing.
That was evident again on Sunday in their 2-0 defeat by Manchester City.
The game showed us the Gunners will beat 85 per cent of teams without even trying.
They will stick three and four past some and people will be crowing, ‘Emery’s landed, they’ve beaten Bournemouth 4-0, cracking performance’.
But it reminded us that when it comes to the crunch they will crumble, just as they have done for the last decade or more.
What Emery needs first and foremost is more players such as Stephan Lichtsteiner.
At 34, the Swiss is at the wrong end of his career but he has a winning record and a winning mentality, too.
However, Emery can’t bring in more players of that ilk until January at the earliest and will need a minimum of another transfer window after that to completely revamp the team built by Arsene Wenger (right).
Even if he somehow managed to do it that quickly, the team would need at least a year to bed in, so you’re looking at 2020 before Emery’s Arsenal are playing the way he wants them to. The trouble is, if he finishes out of the Champions League places this season and next, then Stan Kroenke could even be thinking about wielding the axe. What Emery must do in the meantime, while winning enough games to make sure that isn’t the case, is get stuck into his players and let them know he won’t accept what Wenger did. When John Gregory took over from Brian Little while I was at Aston Villa he did just that and, to be fair to him, challenging us and demanding different things from the previous boss was something he was good at.
He would directly question us as individuals.
I remember scoring two in training one day and he said, ‘Well done, but you should have scored three’.
That wasn’t the way to treat me, I was like, ‘Just give me a pat on the back for scoring two, would you?’ But he would always set the bar higher and some players would like that.
And it worked. Villa were top of the Premier League after 10 or 11 matches in his second season.
That’s what Emery needs to do, if not publicly, then at least in the confines of the dressing room.
Because if he doesn’t it’s going to be the same old same old and the ethos at Arsenal just won’t change.