Reflections …

Morning.

I didn’t watch yesterday’s game between Man City and Liverpool. I went into the city centre, had a few pints in a nice bar, and occasionally checked the score just in case. But there was no case. The Premier League table tells its own story this morning. The title is Liverpool’s, and even if they do have a blip, the gap is so big as to be basically impossible to overturn at this stage.

It would also require us to produce a run of form I don’t think we’re capable of right now. Even if we somehow had all our players available, and match fit, it’d be a tall order. Without them, and with some of the others a long way from their best form, it’s just not something we should be thinking about it. So, this morning, that’s a painful thing for fans to come to terms with, even if it’s not a surprise given the way things have been going. There are still plenty of points to play for, and we have to be professional and win as many of them as we can, but I can’t lie and say it doesn’t feel a bit empty.

If you’re feeling magnanimous, and I fully understand why some of you reading this might not, I think you have to give Liverpool a lot of credit for the season they’ve produced. I’ve never really understood why people thought we only had to finish above Man City to be champions. Liverpool have been a great team for a long time, with some world class players, and they’ve experienced the difficulty of challenging for the league on a consistent basis. People have often talked about Arsenal using the pain of second place finishes as motivation, but lots of this Liverpool squad have plenty of that in reserve too after their battles with Pep Guardiola’s team over the years.

I think they’ve been fortunate with fitness in a way that we haven’t, and obviously that helps, but they’ve also had the best player in the world in the best form of his life, and for me Mo Salah has been the key ingredient. A player who is a level above everyone else in the Premier League, and whose quality and consistency make him an all-time great in English football. The kind of player who helps you find a way to win the games against the West Hams, the Fulhams, and the Newcastles of this world. The kind of player we’re obviously missing, even if I think a fully fit Bukayo Saka has the talent to produce levels of end product that might come close.

I also think our misfortune with injury and suspensions have been a benefit to them, because we’ve dropped too many points along the way, but it’s possible to give props to a team that deserves to win the title, and reflect on the fact that we’ve got too much wrong on and off the pitch. I remember Mikel Arteta talking after the first title challenge, and how he needed to take stock of how things turned out. We’d been leading for so long, then lost William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu to injury, and fell away.

That led to last season when we pushed City even closer, garnering 89 points, scoring more goals and winning more games in a league season than the Invincibles did when we they were champions, but still missed out by 2 points. This time around, we’ve fallen off. I don’t think there’s any argument about that. We got the summer wrong in terms of our transfer business, and as I’ve written lately, a consequence of that is that it made fixing it in January almost impossible.

Internally, that’s something the manager and the board need to reflect on in a serious way. We have to address issues in recruitment, while also focusing on retention, and the need to ensure this summer’s transfer window is a success goes without saying. If we’re getting down to brass tacks, for all that has been good about us, I just don’t think any team can win a title without investing in its forward line properly, and that’s something we just haven’t done in a serious way under this manager.

The issue of the Sporting Director is one that should be sorted as soon as possible too. I know it’s not all down to one man, but going into a summer without that figurehead, that deal maker, cannot be a good thing. Whether it’s Jason Ayto promoted from within, or an external candidate, the club need to get that appointment sorted, because there is a lot to do, and it needs to be done efficiently. Who the right candidate is, I don’t know – my understanding is the club have been going through the process with some external consultants, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

The final thing I’ll say this morning is that even with the disappointment, we might look to Liverpool again. In our two title challenging seasons, they finished 5th and then 3rd. Now look where they are. I always felt that coming close two seasons in a row would produce a kind of hangover, and the consistency of what we produced last season in terms of goals/wins etc, was always going to be difficult to maintain.

We made that job more difficult for ourselves by what we did and didn’t do in the transfer market, but regression doesn’t have to be fatal once you learn from it. There is plenty for Arteta, his coaching staff, and those at executive level to learn from the way this season has panned out – and I still believe we have the quality and the platform within this squad to improve next time out.

In the meantime though, we have to keep going in the league and the Champions League, because how big a job we have to do in the summer will depend to a large extent on what happens between now and May. The players and the manager have to keep their heads up and keep going, even if the title race is now more or less done and dusted.

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I’ll leave it there for this morning. We will have an Arsecast Extra for you later, but we’re not recording until this evening. So, this afternoon, we’ll put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with 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.

For now, have a good one.

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