Arteta flopped on the biggest stage: wrong goalkeeper, slow subs and no ambition
Mikel Arteta’s tactics came unstuck against Pep Guardiola in the Carabao Cup final - Paul Childs/Reuters With his eyes fixed on the prize, Mikel Arteta blinked at the worst possible moment. The man of unbending standards, of fierce and often grimly pragmatic commitment to excellence, allowed himself to be swayed by sentiment. While he claimed to have unconditional trust in Kepa Arrizabalaga, handing his second-choice goalkeeper the chance to atone for his two fateful errors in this fixture, that faith felt sorely misplaced as he flapped horribly to gift Manchester City their opening goal and send Arsenal down a spiral of self-doubt from which they never escaped.
Much like the players reduced to chasing shadows, he looked as if he had seen a ghost. For 25 minutes, Arsenal appeared to forget their very identity, so passive and so daunted by the stakes that they developed a pathological aversion to attack. City could regather and reignite almost at will, to the point where another Kepa implosion became frankly inevitable.
He had already looked skittish, earning a yellow card by pushing Jérémy Doku wide when the Belgian was not even in a clear goalscoring position, and then losing his composure altogether, spilling what should have been a simple stop from Rayan Cherki to free Nico O’Reilly to head into an empty net. Astonishingly, for a third time, he became the Carabao Cup final scapegoat. Kepa Arrizabalaga received a yellow card after getting tangled up with Manchester City’s Jérémy Doku outside his penalty area - Paul Childs/Reuters But the blame, ultimately, rests with Arteta.
He knew all about Kepa’s inglorious history on this stage for Chelsea, how he had missed the decisive penalty against Liverpool in 2022 and how he had refused to be substituted by Maurizio Sarri during defeat by City in 2019. Affording him the chance of absolution for Arsenal was the compassionate move, but hardly the correct one as his team sought to throw off their penchant for self-sabotage. Why on earth, in a final that could have kindled the quest for an unprecedented quadruple, did the manager leave the world-class David Raya on the bench?
It was a gesture of touching loyalty to the figure entrusted throughout this competition. It was not, though, the mark of an uncompromising winner. "Kepa's lost it, AND O'REILLY HAS STOLEN!
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