Inside Arsenal’s Premier League triumph and the crucial intervention that turned the title race
Arsenal faced a series of damaging setbacks on their journey to the Premier League title, writes Miguel Delaney, but Mikel Arteta’s management helped the team stay the course to make history
As Mikel Arteta finally gets to savour the moment, he will be repeating a few words he couldn’t help ruminate on throughout the season. “Twenty-two years,” he’d say to anyone listening. “Twenty-two years.
It’s far too long for a club like Arsenal. ” And now, after so much angst and frustration from the length of that very wait, Arteta and his squad can at last say it’s over. On Sunday, he will lift the Premier League trophy , the club’s first title since 2004 and 14th in all.
The Basque, for his part, was more conscious than anyone of the effects of that wait. He could sense it through the season, that sudden danger when everything looked like slipping away in the manner that so many people expected. If there has been one great virtue of Arsenal’s campaign, it is how Arteta has managed that; how he ensured the team stayed in control .
That was occasionally rather fragile. There were at least four major moments of emotional crisis, when Arteta felt he had to intervene. The trick was always to get the players to look at it from a new perspective, to remember they’d rather be in this situation than not.
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