Calum Chambers says he’s excited to work with Mikel Arteta again and hopes the Spaniard, a teammate of his at the Emirates for two seasons, can help Arsenal get their identity back.
The Spaniard took charge of his first training session at London Colney this morning and doesn’t have much time to get his ideas across before our Boxing Day game against Bournemouth. After that, we’ve got Chelsea and Manchester United at the Emirates in quick succession.
It’s a baptism of fire for a man who has never held a head coach position before, but he’s got the backing of Chambers, who put in put in a man-of-the-match performance against Everton with the 37-year-old watching from the stands.
After Saturday’s 0-0 draw at Everton, Chambers explained why he was buoyed by a reunion with his former captain.
“When I came here he was one of the senior players, he helped me and gave me advice on positional play,” he said.
“He was a very intelligent player, you could always tell he had that side to him. I’m excited, everyone’s excited to work with him and learn his philosophy.
“We’re all excited to work with him, that’s the main feeling around the camp. He came in yesterday and said some words, said some more before the game. We all showed good spirit and are excited to go in and start working with him next week.”
Arsenal are currently 11th in the Premier League table, nine points adrift of the Champions League places. In the short-term, if we’re to salvage our season, we need to string a few victories together quickly. Looking ahead though, it’s going to take a while to get us competing with the top clubs again.
“We just need to get our identity back,” said Chambers. “I know he wants to do that. It will take time but I know he can get that out of us. The message is we’re all excited to start working with him.
“He said that today we put into play what he wanted from us. The message before the game was to be brave, take responsibility and work hard for each other.
“We did that on the pitch today. He said afterwards it’s a good start and there are things to work on. He was proud of the way we worked and how we worked hard today.
“As you said there’s a lot of youth in the team today. I’m really proud of how much effort they put in and how hard they worked.
“They’ve been working hard all season and it showed out there today. It’s promising for the future when you have a lot of young players like that. There are good times ahead.”
It’s all sounding positive fro the players we want to stay. Hopefully everyone gets on board. If anyone don’t, we thank them go their service and wish them the best. No vitriol, just, we need to move on.
Let’s go.
COYG.
Let’s Gooooooo!
Platitudes from players towards a head coach, especially a new one, is par for the course. I hope the output matches their talk.
A P’s son – Wow, I can’t believe baby Jesus was born on this day in Bethlehem.
A P – Actually Christmas is a pagan festival, hijacked first by Christianity and then consumerism. There is no baby Jesus. His birth is just a retelling of a number of ancient myths before we had science to explain everything. Now go and play so I can fill your stocking with coal.
Lol, HH’s officially bonkers. All his clearing of cache and upvoting of his posts couldn’t put HH’s mind together again.
Aw, I do think of you often A P. Every time I write a witty and insightful post which is well received I see that one downvote and think ‘I hope A P is ok.’ Being salty about popularity must be a real burden.
“It’s all sounding positive fro the players we want to stay…”
Speak for yourself. I don’t want Chambers to stay
Weirdo
Main tuing is hope arteta can improve the players’ play theough training like positioning and shape, and then movitivate players to run till they vomit.
Arteta sure knows a thing or 2 on positional play and tackling. I just saw a youtube clip of his highlights when he was playing for us, and one of the tackles was on auba!
“Be brave, take responsibility, and work hard for each other.”
So far Arteta seems right on track with identifying the challenge at hand.
To be honest, “play less shit, stop back passing and make yourself available” are equally applicable.
My heart is extremely hopeful but my mind keeps telling me to keep expectations down to a minimum this season. I know he can’t perform miracles but some of the language sounds almost mystical. What does it mean for us to recapture our “identity” anyway? What is clearly needed is a better drilled team (i.e. everyone knows their position and role in relation to others) with a special emphasis on defence. Arteta must also be able to motivate the players despite their poor performances thus far. Both will take time.
Arsenal Identity = having opposing teams being afraid to play in our ground because defensively we will physically challenge them on every loose ball and every turn over we fight and foul to get the ball back. Our CB’s destroy anyone trying to carry the ball in our third, we are ruthless at defense and leave bodies strewn about the field. That’s the way we used to play. Physical and nasty.
Not for thuggery, but we could definitely use a dose of physicality across all areas of the pitch. At this point, we need to play smarter AND harder to move up the table.
I read a member of the Arsenal hierarchy said the gunners are a cl club. Surely he
must be kidding. Arsenal have no divine right to cl status.You have to earn it
through winning games and not playing pretty soccer and getting beaten by teams
playing physical if not anti soccer.
One more thing is player recruitment. If you get a 2nd rate player how can you
compete with those who pay to get wc players.
Unless you are lucky and get the right player.
“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it – then I can achieve it.”
Muhammad Ali
Clearly you’ve never heard this, have you? No club has a divine right to be in the CL. But those that are there are there on the merit of achieving what they set out to do.
Case in point, you don’t have a divine right to be with any girl (or guy, depending on your preference). But when you see someone you like, you tell yourself you’re in, right?
Yea, so you want us to “float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee”. Can get behind that.
If Blogs put up the whole pic without cropping it, he wouldn’t need to add all that text in the pic ?
Damn blogs and his incessant tomfoolery, doesn’t he know we come here for cold hard facts and nothing more?
I thought he said, “Callum, if you position yourself over here, you can cover your area and half of Papa’s”.
There’s been such a ridiculous turnover at the club recently that the only players left from Arteta’a time (just 3 and a half years ago) are Chambers, Bellerin, Ozil and Emi Martinez (plus Elneny, if you count him).
And it doesn’t exactly look like we’re in for more stability now – it looks like Auba”s probably off, and our midfield and defence need a rebuild.
We need new signings to be young, long term options that we can build a stable core around.
On the contrary, I think we need exactly the type of signing that Mikel was for us when he joined as a player, experienced, intelligent, in the prime years, real quality but without the superstar media hype around him, who added much needed stability to our midfield.
Nice that Chambers is being trotted out to say this stuff, bit until now, not a single word of welcome from our captain.
Where is Aubameyang?
Wasn’t in any of the pics from first training session either. Lots of Lacazette though.
We are, like, hard working, isn’t it.