In his latest blog, the Betway ambassador discusses the final stretch of the Premier League title race, another manager leaving Chelsea, and Hugo Ekitike's World Cup disappointment.
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After defeat to Manchester City at the Etihad, what did you think of how Arsenal responded against Newcastle?
Well, we responded, we won, and that’s about it. If Wissa scores that goal in the six-yard box from the biggest chance in the game, it would have been a different story, but fortunately for us he missed. We tried three short corners at the beginning of the game, one was the winner, and an outstanding goal from Eze.
Other than that, we suffered, but we responded with a 1-0, just like it was for Man City against Burnley, which could have been way more with the opportunities they had.
All we need to do is to try to win games and see if City can drop points. After that, it might be a question of goals, and that’s something that we we’re lacking at the minute, and something that it looks like we might have to improve on if it comes down to that.
Mikel Arteta described these last few games as a ‘new season’ – do you think psychologically it could help Arsenal that they’re no longer being chased down?
I actually don’t know. I’ve been behind in the race and caught people, I have been ahead and I’ve been caught. You can look at momentum, a lot of people were doubting City three months ago, but now nobody is doubting them. They’re on the verge of maybe doing a domestic treble, and Arsenal might be doing a double.
It’s easy to look every weekend and say it’s a new season, or ‘now it matters’. It always matters. The league is 38 games, every game matters, points are points. I always saw it like that, one game at a time. You need to get some points on the board and see what you can do. Arsenal answered with a win, so now it’s on City to answer back.
It’s been said that Arsenal have easier fixtures than City remaining. Does that matter at all at this stage?
Not at all. It doesn’t change anything to me. Do you think it’s going to be easy away at West Ham when they’re trying to stay up? We dropped points against Wolves when we were 2-0 up, and we lost to Southampton. It was supposed to be difficult for Man City at Chelsea, right? You have to respect teams, go out there and perform.
You just have to win games – it doesn’t matter who it is against, or how it is done. This Arsenal team is very different to mine, but at the end of the day if you win the league, no Arsenal fan will complain. Embrace who you are and what you do. We are not a team who are going to create a lot of chances, but we find a way to win games.
Nico O’Reilly had a great game against Arsenal and has been key for City in the second half of the season. Is he the most improved player in the league?
I named him as one of the best young players in the Premier League a few months ago, so it’s clear what I think of him. Nico O’Reilly is a good player who can give you a lot of options. Tactically, especially with the way Pep Guardiola likes to play, he’s a dream come true for a coach. Playing on the inside, the outside, he has an eye for goal at the back post and he’s got an engine, so what’s not to like?
In Pep’s system at Man City, it’s very difficult to stop him because they interchange positions and they’re not rigid. They’re not predictable, and although sometimes you know what they’re going to do, you can’t stop it because the ball is moving so well. So O’Reilly is very difficult to stop, but in that system with the way they play.
Chelsea have moved on from Liam Rosenior. Do you think the amount of change at the club may make managers think twice about that job?
I don’t know about Chelsea in particular, but we’ve seen it at Nottingham Forest, we’ve seen it at Tottenham, we’ve seen it at Chelsea. We’ve seen it a bit too much.
I’m not in the building to know what’s happening, but Chelsea used to change managers around every one-and-a-half to every two years, and they were successful when doing that. During my time they were starting to be more successful, and after my time they basically won everything. They changed managers a lot, but they did give them a tiny bit more time.
Now they’re making the changes quicker. I’ve lost count of how many managers in the last year.
I know you need results now, and I know it looks like Chelsea are at the mercy of Aston Villa winning the Europa League to get into the Champions League via the sixth spot, so people are panicking. But at some point if you don’t give a manager time – and I’m not talking specifically about Liam Rosenior because I don’t know what they were asking him to do – then you start to wonder what we are witnessing.
Patience is a virtue, which we tend to forget. If you look at some of the best coaches now, they struggled at the beginning. People will tell you now that Mikel Arteta is a competitive coach, well-drilled, tactically sound. Look at his first two seasons at Arsenal – he arrived with a team that wasn’t his, still managed to win the FA Cup in the first six months, and then after finishing eighth people wanted his head. You keep him, and now he’s competitive. He went to get the players he wanted, got the money that he wanted, he got the time that he wanted, so now he’s competing.
The first two years of Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, you could see that something was maybe going to happen, but it wasn’t happening at the time.
Those managers had time. Sometimes I understand that teams have goals which they feel they aren’t going to achieve at that particular moment, but my grandmother used to say, “time often brings what the moment refuses.”
Are you willing to miss out on something along the way to be better later on? Will you be patient enough to miss one or two Champions League years, and then maybe win it? Time is important, and sometimes people just don’t want to wait. You can only judge someone after giving them a good amount of time to be able to express themselves.
Whoever the next manager is going to be, that guy needs time. Look how long it took the great Pep Guardiola to put Manchester City together this season.
He had to make Cherki understand what was happening – that took seven months. He had to go and get Guehi and Semenyo, so he had to wait six months. He had to make Nico O’Reilly understand how to play at left back, going inside and outside.
Now his team are on the verge of maybe winning a domestic treble, but it took him up to January or February to get a competitive team, and still he had to go and get two guys that were not in the building at the beginning of the season. That’s the great Pep Guardiola, and everyone knows what I think of him. Let’s keep it real, it’s not easy.
Hugo Ekitike will miss the end of the season and the World Cup with a torn Achilles. How disappointed are you for him?
I was watching the game and straight away you knew it was bad. I felt sorry for him obviously, and as an ex-player you think about the World Cup and everything else. More importantly, he was playing for Reims, then he went to PSG and everyone thought that he might lose his way because he wasn’t playing. People thought he was never going to be that guy because he went there too early.
What I loved was that he thought, “OK, I’m not going to sit here and die on the bench with people thinking I’m done,” and he went to Germany and battled. He had an outstanding season. He comes to Liverpool where people thought he was going to sit for Isak, but no, he answered the call and did pretty well for his first season.
It’s not only about the World Cup, it’s what he had to go through at a young age, to come back and reposition himself, and now he’s going to have to do it again.
He came to the ‘top of the mountain’ and now he’s fallen again, for different reasons. It must be very difficult for him mentally, but he had the belief to do it once and I’m sure he can do it again.
France have so many great attacking players to choose from, but did Ekitike offer them something that nobody else has?
I don’t know what Didier Deschamps is going to do, who is going to play as a No. 9, but Ekitike can give you three options. He can play as a lone striker, behind the striker, or he can give you 15 minutes or a bit more on the left if you need him to.
But France still have Marcus Thuram, and people forget that Jean-Phillippe Mateta just came back. He’s a very different type of No. 9, more like Giroud, holding, willing to play and attack crosses.
Fortunately for us in France, we have options, but it’s not so much about options because if he was fit, I think Ekitike would have been in that squad. It’s tough to see, and it’s unfortunate when you knew you were virtually on the plane, and suddenly you’re not.
