RISKY ART OF A BOSS

HINDSIGHT is a wonderful thing. But that’s the point of it, isn’t it? It tells you what did wrong after the event.

So, in using hindsight to say Mikel Arteta got it wrong in the Europa League semifinal, I’m saying it’s easy now to see he got it wrong.

Taking off Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (above) with 10 minutes to go when you needed one goal to go through to the final looked wrong to me at the time. It looks worse now.

I think you always back your best goalscorers in those situations.

I look back to the 2007 Champions League Final and I still think it was a mistake not to have me on the bench – because I always believed I would get a goal when it mattered.

In that final, we needed a goal in the last few minutes and, no matter where I was in my career, I believed I could provide that goal (and I seem to remember I did it coming off the bench in the UEFA Cup final!).

What Arteta did was risky and it didn’t pay off. Risky because it just invites more pressure. And he’s under enough already.

You can see by his demeanour he knows it. He knows ninth is not good enough and he knows that failure to qualify Arsenal for Europe for the first time 25 years is a damning statistic.

Arsenal have a big decision to make. They have a young manager still learning the game – his decision to change his systems in the semi-final and use new ones was risky and wrong.

So do they let him learn on the job, hoping his qualities will finally come through? Or do they follow what Chelsea did with Frank Lampard and say he wasn’t quite ready?

It’s a huge decision and it must be made this summer.