Mikel Arteta’s press conference ahead of tomorrow’s game between Chelsea and Arsenal saw him asked a fair bit about the Blues, and he spoke at length about the project that the new ownership has committed to at Stamford Bridge.
Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary Arteta was willing to tie his colours to the mast and claim that he was “convinced” that the new model would succeed – for the simple reason that if you spend enough money on something, it will usually work out eventually.
“I am convinced they will [be a success]. With that squad, yes. And with the manager they have.
“If you look at the history of the Premier League, in the last 20 years [at the top] are the ones that have spent the most, what has happened there is a big relation [between success and money spent], depending on how you look at it.
“They will have their vision and be very clear in how they want to get there.”
He also talked up our form and agreed with Mauricio Pochettino that we should be a lot higher in the table:
“They deserve to be in a much higher position in the league when you look at what they have done and what they produce in games. “They have a reached a final, they have reached a semi-final, they could have gone through. I think what Mauricio is doing is really impressive and I’m sure that he is going to get them there,” Arteta said, noting “huge improvements” in the team.
Kidology to the max – or the real deal?
It’s a well known trope that managers only like to praise their upcoming opposition in these press conferences. Firstly they don’t want to say anything insulting which the other team could use as motivation. Secondly, by bigging their opposite number up, they make any potential victory look better and any potential defeat more understandable.
But in this case we think Arteta does believe that Chelsea will reach success, simply because what he says is true: there’s an immensely strong correlation between spending and success, and Chelsea have certainly had enough of the former.
I think this is a perfect case of Mikel Arteta showing more objectivity than SuperFrank, lol!
Arteta had his own trials and tribulations in his first year at Arsenal when the supporters wanted him gone, and look how that turned out! He knows full well the challenges Poch faces trying to shape a young squad amid sky high expectations and there’s no doubt that he’s a more astute judge of the progress Poch has achieved than the ever-negative SuperFrank. It’s just a shame that the latter can’t report on a story like this without inserting his “mounting evidence to the contrary” comments. Did it ever occur to SuperFrank that perhaps Mikel Arteta knows A LOT MORE about football than he does and that Arteta’s comments (combined with Lampard’s similarly positive recent remarks) might indicate that he’s got it wrong with his long-running “the sky is falling” narrative?