Mikel Arteta has scooped the third manager of the month award of his fledgling career after Arsenal posted five wins out of five in the Premier League in August.
The Spaniard promptly oversaw a 3-1 defeat to Manchester United on 4 September which will do nothing to quell talk of the gong being cursed.
Is that right? Or is it the first game after the prizewinner has been announced that’s cursed? We never know…hopefully, the former.
Either way, Arsenal remain top of the Premier League table ahead of this weekend’s clash with Brentford.
Antonio Conte, Pep Guardiola, Graham Potter and Marco Silva were also in the running but their teams dropped points, so it wasn’t exactly a hard decision for the judges.
Martin Odegaard, Gabriel Jesus and William Saliba were variously up for player of the month and goal of the month awards but didn’t win.
Good news. Now if he can scoop the award for the team’s performance in the closing month(s) of this season …
Surprised at the negative reaction to my earlier comment. Surely, if we finish the season with an outstanding performance the likelihood is that it will have been successful. Obviously, any award like this is a good reflection but in the PL it’s not how you start, but how you finish that’s often the determining factor, isn’t it?
Great start and well deserved for Mikel, let’s hope we can turn around the Brentford result from last season and get back to winning ways, particularly for the PL match after that.