MIKEL ARTETA travels to Aston Villa today desperately seeking to get Arsenal’s title challenge back on track.
So the last thing he needs as he tries to end his team’s first mini-slump of the season is to run slap bang into the managerial rival who would love nothing more than to add to his agony.
It is more than three years since Unai Emery was sacked by Arsenal yet the pain of that brutal dismissal is still felt to this day.
And while the Villa boss has publicly tried to play down the significance of this afternoon’s encounter, don’t believe for one minute that he is ready to let bygones be bygones.
He has already had one taste of revenge when he was the mastermind of Villarreal’s Europa League semi-final victory over Arsenal two seasons ago.
But that two-legged affair was played out behind closed doors during the pandemic and today’s game will be his first encounter with the Gunners supporters who made his life a misery towards the end of his brief Emirates reign.
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Arteta insists he has nothing but admiration for his fellow Spaniard who was handed the thankless task of trying to replace Arsene Wenger in 2018.
He says: “Unai is a very good manager who will always give opponents a difficult test.
“I have huge respect for everywhere he has been and for all the success that he’s had.”
But that approval hasn’t stopped him from taking a chainsaw to his predecessor’s legacy and ripping up almost everything he inherited from Emery in order to start from scratch.
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Of the Arsenal team which started Emery’s final League match in charge in November 2019, only Kieran Tierney remains at the club.
And even he spends most of his time on the subs’ bench these days.
All the rest have been offloaded with almost indecent haste after Arteta received the green light to purge a toxic dressing-room.
Mesut Ozil, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, David Luiz, Alex Lacazette, Hector Bellerin, Calum Chambers and Sokratis were all allowed to leave for nothing.
Some of them were even paid off just to get them out of the club, while Bernd Leno, Matteo Guendouzi and Lucas Torrerira were sold at a huge loss.
Yet not everyone who featured at Arsenal during Emery’s time in charge has been jettisoned by the new regime.
William Saliba and Gabriel Martinelli were both signed on his watch and Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe were also handed their debuts by the former Valencia, Sevilla and PSG boss.
And those young stars have emerged as the cornerstones of Arteta’s famous ‘project’ to win the club’s first Premier League title since 2004.
But those ambitions have been temporarily put on hold after failure to win any of their last three League games has opened the door for Manchester City to replace them at the top of the table.
It was only one month ago that Arsenal had an eight-point lead over their nearest rivals following the North London derby win at Spurs.
But Wednesday’s 3-1 home defeat by City knocked them off pole position for the first time since mid-August.
And Arsenal suddenly look vulnerable to opponents who don’t worry about possession and prefer to hit on the counter attack and at set-pieces.
Everton, Brentford and even City have all used those tactics to spike Arsenal’s guns in recent weeks and Arteta knows he will face more of the same from Villa today.
Yet he refutes suggestions that his team has been sussed out and points out: “We have faced 16 low blocks this season and won a lot of those games.
“We are a team that wants to have the ball and dominate games but there are always things to improve and our efficiency in the box hasn’t been as good as it was when we were winning games.
“For the last few months we have talked about the position we’re in, the way the team is playing and the things we need to do to stay there.
“We know the level we want to be at and there were a lot of positives to take from the City game on Wednesday even though the result did not go our way.
“I have seen with my own eyes that my team can match anyone and in case the players didn’t spot it I showed it to them all on the day after the game, just in case they had any doubts.
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“On Wednesday we were up against the best team this league has had in decades and we were hugely disappointed not to get a result.
“A few years ago we were looking at City and saying ‘we are so far away from them’. Now we are closer, but we’re not close enough because they’re much more efficient than us.”
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
