The coaches who have been able to achieve success at the highest level and for any sort of consistent period had one thing in common. They knew how and when to change things to help their team to perform. The past few weeks have seen Mikel Arteta struggle to make the right changes to this floundering Arsenal team to help them to become stable and begin to put some points on the board. Performances in the league have been stale to say the least and Arteta, who has lofty ambitions for his side, has to see that the time for change is now and do what is necessary to save Arsenal’s rapidly-stagnating season.
Arteta, lest we forget is in his first job as a head coach and because of this he was bound to make mistakes. The judgement will be more severe when it is proven that he has no remedies to the issues that face him and his side. This Arsenal team have not reached the point of no return, far from it in fact. Part of the problem that Arsenal are facing are due to their attempts to play in a way that Arteta believed would be effective at bringing the best out of the players he had. The benefit of the of this kind of problem is that it it’s remedy is largely within Arteta’s control.
There difficult part for Arteta will be having to decide which parts of this team and how they play can he change without compromising his overall philosophy. We have seen him acquiesce to the loud demands from fans to play Aubameyang up front and give Joe Willock a starting berth in the league. None of these individual changes yielded a significant positive effect for the Gunners and perhaps unsurprisingly so.
Being a disciple of the Guardiola school of football, Arteta is clearly a manager with dogmatic dispositions and these have hampered the possible effects of the few compromises he has made during the season. Arsenal have largely insisted on building play through the wide areas before either switching to the other side of the field and more recently crossing into the box. This has meant that key players, mainly Aubameyang, are unable to get on the ball in dangerous areas and has made Arsenal predictable and easy to defend against. Unsurprisingly they have only scored one open play league goal in the last 4 games.
Arteta was unable to come up with a suitable answer to Jose Mourinho last weekend as cross after cross, 44 of them in all, was dealt with by Tottenham on their way to a comfortable 2-0 victory against the Gunners. That result would have been all the more painful for Arteta because it was common knowledge how Mourinho would set up his side and yet Arsenal could not come up with any sort of cogent plan to break down their opponents. After the game Arteta was very particular about what he said, praising the players for following his instructions and doing everything he asked of them. In this game Arteta stuck to his guns and tried to play in a way that has been unsuccessful for most of the season, leading to embarrassing losses against Aston Villa and Wolves as well as a lucky draw against Leeds United. He was not able to come up with the necessary tweaks to the way his team was playing, rather he doubled down on his failing plan and it cost him valuable points and against Spurs, bragging rights.
There is widespread confidence in Arteta because of how impressive the early part of his tenure was, and the general consensus that he is a great tactician. The fans are behind him and against Burnley he needs to reward that support. What Gunners fans want proof of is that Arteta has the tactical nous to make changes in how his team plays to enable them to perform and get results. The past few weeks have not been an example of that and things need to change.
Tomorrow Arsenal face Burnley and it is an invaluable opportunity to put quite the critics a little. Burnley are a strong defensive side (even though they have not got going this season) and will come to the Emirates prepared to defend from beginning to end and the absolute worst thing Arsenal can do will be to lob even more hopeful balls into the Clarets box in the hope that Aubameyang (4 headed goals in Arsenal career) and Lacazette (3 headed goals in Arsenal career) will have some joy against a very robust Burnley backline.
Arteta has absolutely no choice but to make some changes. Personnel wise it will be interesting to see whether Willian gets yet another start to do the bare minimum offensively, or whether Aubameyang persists at centre forward. Whatever the case in that department is Arteta will have to encourage his team to be more adventurous and improvise a bit more. The talents of Bukayo Saka – who got the most assists for Arsenal last season but hasn’t recorded an assist this campaign – are absolutely wasted slaving away on the wing trying to constantly put crosses in.
Arteta will need to ask his midfield to be more proactive with the ball. Although in terms of personnel Arteta’s midfield is not ideal, we have seen Dani Ceballos (especially against Liverpool) play very good line-breaking passes and Muhammed Elneny and Granite Xhaka have some directness in their lockers as well. Instead of attempting to funnel the ball to the wide areas constantly these players should be tasked with trying to go through Burnley and find some joy in the central areas.
This will be a good game to return Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to the left. This will mean that he evades the attentions of the Burnley centre backs and can find some joy making runs into the box from out wide. The main reason why this system has not worked this season is not that Aubameyang cannot play out wide (he won the Golden Boot from that position) but because Arteta was asking his team to build up play in a way that prevented him from getting touches in the danger areas as he had done in previous seasons. It is not a matter of where you start on the field but the areas you can get on the ball during the game.
This game is an absolute must win for Arsenal and more importantly for Mikel Arteta. He has been carrying around an air of tactical genius that has been bestowed on him due to his background and now he needs to prove why it is justified. There will be 2,000 fans at the Emirates on Sunday and he can instantly begin gathering momentum if he cayn get his side to perform to their lofty standards on Sunday.