THIS IS A GAMBLE BUT ARSENAL HAD VERY LITTLE CHOICE
IN TRUTH, when isn’t it a gamble? There is no such thing as a guarantee in football and the closer you get to one, then the more it will cost.
Tottenham are paying Jose Mourinho a salary Arsenal refuse to consider — and if the Gunners could attract Pep Guardiola they wouldn’t go for his sidekick.
Jurgen Klopp cannot be prised from Liverpool and Brendan Rodgers made it clear he was not prepared to leave Leicester for north London.
Trace the line of the graph back from the names closest to what conventional wisdom considers a sure thing and you are very quickly in with the gamblers, where every candidate comes with a question mark.
Too old. Over the hill. Too young. Won nothing. No experience. Won the lot. No appetite. Never played. Never coached.
Too English. Too foreign. Long ball, too direct. Over-complicated, not direct enough. An introvert. An extrovert, too brazen. Self-obsessed.
Pick your poison. The world is l long past saturation point when it comes to opinion and vested interests abound so any selection will be criticised. The important thing is to have direction and purpose. Arsenal may have made a convincing show of being an utter shambles and yet there are threads of sense within the chaos o of their move for Mikel Arteta.
After Unai Emery’s confused messages they wanted clarity. They sought a manager to appeal to supporters and sweeten the mood inside the Emirates Stadium. Someone with identifiable principles when it comes to the way football should be played and who would connect with modern players in an international dressing room and command their respect. T They wanted another Arsene W Wenger, as Sportsmail’s Sami Mokbel revealed on the very day Emery was sacked.
Arteta ticks important boxes. He knows the competitions, knows the players, knows the club. They know him as an intelligent leader; a strong Basque with a steady head, keen to shoulder responsibility in the days when he was club captain. He is what they like to consider an ‘Arsenal man’. And he has been close to some of football’s most progressive minds: not only Guardiola but Wenger and Mauricio Pochettino, his captain at Paris Saint-Germain.
At Everton, under David Moyes, he appreciated his role in a team which was strong at the back and played successfully to its strengths.
In a Sportsmail interview in 2014, soon after he became Arsenal captain, Arteta told me: ‘I’ve played in lots of different teams. I’ve played long balls and short balls and, believe me, if you love football you want to play the Arsenal way.
‘When I joined Everton... at the start we were very physical. We were the best in the league at doing that so why would we not play long ball? It’s one thing to be cautious, another to be careless.’
There is risk, of course. Arsenal manager is one of the biggest jobs in English football and one made bigger by the club’s slide under their absent owner Stan Kroenke. The squad lacks balance, there are limited transfer funds and a disjointed recruitment policy, far removed from the smooth operation at Manchester City.
Arteta is unproven as the frontman. Can he thrive? Can he improve these players? Can he identify problems from the touchline and solve them in the midst of an elite contest? There will be pressure, which can be offset by allowing him to appoint a backroom staff he trusts.
There are no risk-free appointments. Arsenal have picked their poison. A good option at the price they were willing to pay.
In Arteta they trust.