Mikel Arteta spent the week answering critics who questioned his selection and the approach his team showed against Manchester City last weekend.<\/p>\n
Supporters had been vocal online about the starting XI, in particular the midfield three of Mikel Merino, Mart\u00edn Zubimendi and Declan Rice. Many suggested Arsenal had played with \u201cthe handbrake on.\u201d<\/p>\n
The manager offered a very different read of the game and said the reaction he was receiving away from the public was more positive. \u201cI heard a lot of things using my phone, they could not believe what we did to Manchester City ,\u201d Arteta boasted. He said comments were coming from \u201cPeople who are coaches, managers, CEOs, presidents.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arsenal limited Manchester City to just 33% possession, a figure the manager highlighted as evidence of his side\u2019s control. The number was described in his media remarks as the lowest figure ever recorded by a Guardiola team.<\/p>\n
Arteta addressed the wider narrative directly. \u201cI don\u2019t read it [the reaction], but I do get told a little bit what the narrative is around it,\u201d Arteta told assembled media ahead of Arsenal\u2019s trip to Port Vale . \u201cIf you tell me that this [negativity] is the main one, if I\u2019m surprised, I will be extremely surprised. With my knowledge and my know-how, and how I analyse a football game, it was impossible for anybody to predict such a dominance from Arsenal throughout 96 minutes because it never happened in 17 years of Pep [Guardiola] as a manager.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if the narrative goes somewhere else and we talk about dominance, about something else, how can you be dominant against such a team if you have a handbrake? Dominance and handbrake are two different words, but I accept everything. I will learn more to have a different vision,\u201d he sarcastically concluded.<\/p>\n
He also defended his individual selection choices. \u201cI don\u2019t think that one player makes that,\u201d he snapped. \u201cWhen you see the behaviour of our team, if you\u2019re going to define that with one player playing one position, I understand a collective sport in a completely different way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arteta defended Arsenal’s approach vs Manchester City, citing praise from coaches and executives…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3028,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,969],"tags":[253,1068],"class_list":["post-3029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-premier-league","tag-declan-rice","tag-dominance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}