MIKEL ARTETA worked wonders to get Arsenal into second place considering the players he had at his disposal.
But when a manager has massively over-performed and raised a club’s expectations so high, there’s often a fallout if the level of improvement isn’t maintained the following season.
And when that happens, he’s often gone by Christmas.
Now I am not for one minute suggesting that the Gunners are going to be getting rid of Arteta, but I do fear that this could be as good as it gets for them.
Talk of Arsenal bottling the title race was nonsense because they played to their absolute maximum and came up just short of the best team in the world.
No one expected them to finish so high but the downside to all that is where do they go from here?
I hate to sound like a prophet of doom, but I do believe that a lot of this team has already peaked.
It was possibly the best season that many of them will ever have. I don’t think they’ll get to that level again.
They’re definitely not going to challenge Manchester City next season and without serious recruitment this summer it will be a struggle for them to finish runners-up again.
City’s B team is better than any other Premier League side and we know that Newcastle, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea will all be much stronger next time out.
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So if Arsenal want to push on from here, they have to sign four big, experienced leaders this summer.
Declan Rice could certainly be one of those, but if I’m going to spend £100million on one player, I want a Jack Grealish type of player who is going to give me goals and assists, not a holding midfielder.
The problem is that Arsenal want players who are already acclimatised to English football and they’re always going to be overpriced when you buy from your Premier League rivals.
Ben White cost £50m and we still don’t know if he is meant to be a centre-half, a right-back or a central midfielder.
Arsenal need another centre-half, a striker, a midfielder and a winger. And they all need to be better than the players they already have.
They have spent more than £400m on new signings since Arteta was appointed in 2019 but none of them were players City would have wanted.
I am not for one minute suggesting that the Gunners are going to be getting rid of Arteta, but I do fear that this could be as good as it gets for them.
Tony Adams
They’ve always fished in the pool of second dibs, but you don’t catch the serial champions without recruiting the same elite level of player.
Unfortunately I don’t think they have the cash to buy everything they need this summer and that’s why I fear they have already missed their window of opportunity to win the title.
I was talking with George Graham the other day and he said this Arsenal team has no resilience. They had a technical leader but no physical leaders to stand strong in the games that really mattered.
There wasn’t enough experience in the camp from top to bottom.
I also don’t think there are enough people in the backroom staff challenging the manager like me and Joe Jordan did when we worked with Harry Redknapp at Portsmouth.
Arteta said that none of his players had reached their peak and denied that they ran out of steam.
Well, sorry Mikel, but I have to disagree on both counts. Mentally, physically and emotionally, they ran out of resources when some lost form and others were ruled out by injury.
I get the impression that Arteta didn’t have much faith in his back-up players and so he picked the same team week after week when some of them were crying out for a rest.
Every time I won the league with Arsenal, we always had magnificent back-up players sitting on the bench.
David O’Leary, Ian Wright, Martin Keown, Sylvain Wiltord, Freddie Ljungberg, Gilberto Silva, some of the greatest players in the club’s history, all served as understudies at one point or another.
There’s no one of that calibre currently waiting in the Emirates wings and that’s why they couldn’t sustain their title challenge all the way to the finishing post.
Of course they’ll regret not snatching the title when it was up for grabs because a lot of things went their way in terms of going unbeaten in all of their London derbies and so many other big clubs messing up.
Someone said to me the other day that the 84 points Arsenal finished with would have been enough to win the title in some previous eras.
City’s B team is better than any other Premier League side and we know that Newcastle, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea will all be much stronger next time out.
Tony Adams
But that’s totally irrelevant because awesome City have raised the bar so much higher and are turning it into a one-team league.
They are so dominant that it’s becoming boring, so at least we should thank Arsenal for giving them a run for their money.
And while I get the opportunity, I also want to put on record that the supporters have been absolutely magnificent.
I played my entire career at the Highbury Library and George always used to tell us that we couldn’t rely on the crowd to get us going. But the Ashburton Army and the North London Forever anthem means the Emirates is a proper stadium for the first time since we’ve been here.
It wasn’t so long ago that there was a pretty toxic atmosphere at the home games but now it’s an absolute joy to attend.
So we might not be as good as City on the pitch, but at least our fans are better than theirs.
And that’s got to be something worth celebrating, hasn’t it?
