Bournemouth - on the bus. Same old story
Arteta holds on to his first eleven in a lose-lose situation. Not for the first time, and definitely not for the last.
That was one of my very rare visits on the Emirates. I fully understood the context of this game, so my only realistic hope was to see young Nwaneri (and potentially other young players) given as much gaming time as possible. Unfortunately, Arteta had other plans and unleashed the strongest eleven, bar Timber and Merino. I thought that the idea could be to have the Paris eleven play intense first half, get some goal advantage and then start rotating massively in the second half. But even that idea was wrong.
The first team started the game very actively, they actually didn’t give Bournemouth many opportunities, created a couple of openings and eventually Rice put us in the lead. Declan again fully deserved to be on the scoresheet, being one of the most active on the pitch. In the first half I have finally witnessed one consequence of Arteta’s commands from the bench. During one of the Bournemouth free kicks, he and Jover insisted that Rice should sit back to win headers, which he eventually did. The second interesting moment was when during the goal celebration Odegaard ran to Arteta and discussed with him something in detail.
This was a clear demonstration why he’s a chosen captain and that’s why there’s no chance Arteta would bench Odegaard in any of the important games despite the dropped performance level. This game was no exception. Odegaard couldn’t handle at times a simple pass, he didn’t open Bournemouth defence much, he didn’t show enough initiative, he didn’t drive with the ball. A cherry on top of the cake was when instead of shooting from the edge of the box he took three absolutely unneeded touches and lost the ball. In the last two games he had a couple of chances where his shots were quite close to reach the target. Despite that he just makes wrong decisions over and over - he overthinks, he takes too long. He’s really not helping the team at this moment, but I see that he will definitely start in Paris.
I also took a closer look at Huijsen, who plays at LCB in Bournemouth and is strongly linked with our transfer window. In person, he looked at least 50% smaller than Kiwior and probably half the size of Saliba and Gabriel. It looked like a red flag to me, until… he actually scored an equalizer. He also didn’t give too many chances to our attackers in the second half. But maybe it’s not fully on him..
After a pretty passive halftime warm-up and the way our bench players wore their jackets in the start of the second half I understood that Arteta didn’t even plan to rotate today
The first change happened only in the 70th minute after he directly asked Rice how he’s feeling and didn’t receive a convincing response back. The rest of the players were not given a signal until the 82nd minute (when Iraola already brought 4 fresh players that were giving trouble to our defence). It became clear that Arteta dragged his heels with the first choice players until he had actually given up on the result. And it was clear that he'd given up because Sterling was prepared to step in. Sterling was not sent to save the game we were losing since January. It was always rather Tierney than Raheem.
Predictably, the game was lost without even a single good chance in the end. Arteta could rotate the squad significantly and have a win-win situation. Either he wins, gives confidence to rotation players and keeps the main eleven fresh for Madrid, just as Inzaghi and Flick did. Or he loses and explains it with focus being elsewhere so that it doesn’t affect the main eleven’s mood and fatigue, just as Luis Enrique did. But instead Arteta chooses a lose-lose situation, where a narrow win would not really have much meaning, but a loss definitely affects everyone in a negative way.
All the pre-game talk about involving the bigger squad and prevention of injuries was just empty talk. We were in this exact same situation in January where Arteta rolled out a first choice eleven in the Carabao Cup and the FA cup in a single week and managed to lose both of them. Now it’s clear that he hasn’t learned a single lesson there.
Five years in and Arteta absolutely doesn't trust his larger squad. Else, why wouldn’t he rotate in the beginning of the second half? We were 1-0 up and we could add fresh legs to keep intensity and our initiative in the game. And the personnel actually don't matter to him. Zinchenko was a major player in our 22/23 second place campaign. Also, if not everybody remembers, last year Zinchenko was brought in the home game against Bayern and we established ball control, overtook initiative and didn’t allow Sane and Bayern to have any big chances. But since he isn’t part of Arteta's favorites anymore he doesn't get gaming time. Ethan Nwaneri has been driving our attack in a couple of games this season and showed his strong potential. But he didn’t show consistency (how dare he in his 17 to do that?) so now he’s left on the sidelines.
With all the waiting to actually come on the pitch, predicted time wasting and fouls from Bournemouth those two were reduced to about 7-8 minutes of real gaming time. What are they supposed to do in these minutes? Realistically, if the player is not Messi (or Saka), they’d need a couple of minutes to get a sense and rhythm of the game. So Arteta leaves them basically below 5 minutes to pull a miracle. That doesn’t give players any sense of belonging to the team and doesn’t help to develop a larger squad we can rely on.
Arteta doesn’t actually have the ability to patiently develop a young player. Myles was just an exception, who with his immense mentality level came and took his spot by being consistently the best option. But that’s a rare exception. The general rule is that youngsters don’t have consistency and need gaming time to develop it. Instead, Nwaneri scores against Ipswich and is afterwards reduced to 8 minute cameos (while Sterling starts against Palace).
Arteta is talking about “the attitude standards”, which basically means treating each game as a serious one and having the mindset to win it. Well, leaving your first eleven for 85 minutes on the pitch, when it is clear that most of their minds are in Paris, doesn't help to maintain the standards. It’s just a stubborn and stupid decision. If you really want to win every game, then in this very specific context you give the opportunity for the players who would have the mind set on winning the Bournemouth game (since they know they won’t start in Paris). And if you surround them with main players and tell them to work intensively in their shorter shift, they will pick up the overall rhythm and desire to win.
Instead, now we ended up with fatigued starters and out of practice reserves. The injury crisis this year not only failed to make Arteta reconsider his approach, but also provided the excuse material for some fans. At the stadium one of the neighbors in all honesty replied to me “there’s no one to bring in, everyone’s injured”. But if you really think about it, we had only a single player injured who could have been brought to enhance our attack - Kai Havertz. The rest of missing players are from the defensive part of the pitch. But one of the picked up narratives is that we are full of injuries and Arteta doesn’t really have options.
Now, the summary of yesterday’s result is:
We lost to Bournemouth both games this year with them not giving us real chances after taking the lead.
We will most probably lose our second place in the league after the Liverpool and Newcastle games.
Our starting players were the only ones from CL semifinalists to put in a full shift.
The mood before Paris is now down and apart from Merino at CF we don’t have anything different (from today) to expect on Wednesday.
In case of our one-goal lead we would go to extra time, which would give even more advantage to fresh PSG players.
In this situation winning in Paris would require a true miracle. We have already had one last month against Real in London. Is there any chance we would pull another one?