Unai Emery has acknowledged that recent results have not been up to par, but says that fans need to be patient with the team as they try and cope with what he says are difficult circumstances.
Citing the unexpected summer departure of Laurent Koscielny, the attack on Mesut Ozil and Sead Kolasinac, and the issue with Granit Xhaka which saw him stripped of the captaincy, the Arsenal boss says he’s taking a ‘realistic’ view of his side’s current performance.
The Gunners go to Leicester on Saturday evening having won just two of their last nine Premier League games, but Emery says he’s not unhappy with what has been produced because of all the other issues.
“I’m not really disappointed with our work,” he said.
“I am being realistic because some circumstances did not help us to achieve best emotional balance because with that, comes best performance.
“First we are speaking about the captain’s circumstances. If Laurent Koscielny was still here, the captain would be Koscielny and that would give us no problem.
“Then also some circumstances with some players … with Sead Kolasinac and with Mesut Ozil … then also circumstances that didn’t help us with Xhaka.
“I think the supporters have seen that their team needs more to improve to achieve the best results.
“I can and I want to say to them, they must have patience and in some circumstances they did not help us, but we are trying to achieve the best emotional balance with the players.
“Saturday is a very good opportunity, a very difficult match, we know, we are going to prepare and we want to be one step ahead.
“We want to show our best performance and I am optimistic, but I also know that we need to be 100 per cent efficient.”
Arsenal could find themselves nine points off the top four if the result doesn’t go our way at the King Power on Saturday evening. There will be little patience on display if the manager can’t elicit a performance from his team for such an important fixture.
“I can and I want to say to them, they must have patience and in some circumstances they did not help us”
Never a good thing to have a go at the fan base Mr Emery!!
I think he means the circumstances didn’t help us, not the fans. I thought he meant the fans at first, but I just think it’s bad English causing the confusion.
I could be wrong though. He could be mad enough to have a pop at the fans!
I understood the same i.e. He meant the circumstances
Who’s responsible for those circumstances, according to you? Who, if not the manager?
Meanwhile, Emery is buys scheming away, hiring goons to attack his players and in cahoots with the Russians to persuade the fanbase to persecute his latest choice as captain..
#MustafiIn
Word. Another word. Opportunity. Chaffinch. Performance. Circumstances. Difficult. LoveHammer.
Simon. Stainrod.
I wrote this comment in response to a question about formations, below. I’m aiming to answer the following question with some tactical analysis: Why doesn’t Emery just play Pepe, Auba, Laca and Ozil together and out-score the opposition? I’m posting it here, a bit higher up on the page, so more people can read it. Hope some find it useful. PAL + Ozil most naturally lends itself to a 4-2-3-1 formation. ——AL—— PA—MO—NP etc. Both wide players would be cutting into the box to offer an attacking threat, a strategy which requires full-backs to press high up the pitch to… Read more »
Appreciate you took the time to type all this mate but so many fans have been begging for exactly this for months. Keown even called for it after the match on Wednesday.
I just call it the dream 4231.
Seems very obvious to me oh and my name
for the attack?
LAMP Laca-Auba-Mesut-Pepe
Not the best name but it’ll do!
As for the cbs yes they’re not great but they should look much better with Torreira sitting in front of them and not Xhaka who allows players to run straight at them unchallenged.
Maybe the search for those 2 players is unfruitfull at the moment?
It’s the coaches job to instil the teamwork, tactics and discipline so that the defence is capable of the job. We don’t have bad players, and whichever ones we use or buy will have the same problems in this mess. #emeryout
You must try to translate his words into general English. Emeretymologise first.
I translated that sentence with Google translate into my mother tongue, According to the AI he is on the fans.
If his English isn’t goo enough to communicate the point he’s trying to get across he shouldn’t involve the fans. I personally don’t buy into this poor communication saga, as when it come to speaking about the players mental health (ozil last season, xhaka this), he always speaks perfectly.
that’s… charitable. I took it to be pointed at the fans too. Especially as he has a habit of pointing to others when he’s looking for excuses (which in fact, a lot of this is). It would be easier not digging out individuals but talking in general about morale/ performance, positivity etc etc. Even pointing to good things (kids getting minutes). Quite frankly being bland is sometimes good. What seems to have disappeared is his talk of his own tactics and prep (unless I’ve missed it or they’re simply not being reported by the media). ie what he’s responsible for.… Read more »
ah, have now read his (other) interview on Sky where he does talk about tactics a bit.
Though… there’s no clarity.
I think as a communicator this is Emery’s biggest fault. Its not English, heavy accent etc. Its clarity (or lack of). There was an Arsecast with a journo that covered him in Spain and said translating his Spanish to English was always a slog – I believe its due to lack of clarity
Patience? We’ve had 535 days to see your team regress by every single available metric.
and with the benefit of very strong transfer window business….
Emery just joined the #EmeryOut camp! It’s like he wants to get sacked.
His word structures from Spanish hint at him pointing at the fans; and also the fact that it is true in my opinion, some of us (or not?!) weren’t very helpful with the whole Xhakageddon.
Fuck him and his poor English. If we can’t decipher his words, how will Freddie and the team have a clue?
Well his job is to deal with these circumstances and from my POV he has failed on all possible levels.
I don’t understand how he doesn’t see that he is the root problem in all this. If he just benched Xhaka instead of playing him while he was terrible he could have saved some of the hate. As for Ozil, he chose to leave Mesut out of the squad for months and integrated kolasinac pretty quickly after the robbery. There’s no excuse for either of those. Just bad management
You realize sicknote was injured for a few weeks after the incident as well.
He has also dragged out the captaincy thing, absolutely nothing or nobody made him do that. To say our bridge burning ex captain leaving the way he did is the reason behind the “problem” of the captaincy for the first 2 and a half months of the season is just ludicrous!
Kos was planned to stay one more season, so we were prepared somehow. Kola is a squad player, Özil and the Xhaka thing totally mistreated by Unai. And now we have a full squad like never before without the long Rosickilist injuries.
Ridiculous excuses.
He probably thinks we’re stupid enough to buy his excuses
He’s desperately trying to buy himself more time
“but we are trying to achieve the best emotional balance with the players”
Absolute classic Emerywaffle!
he is so confuse and not having his best team to choose for.
not having his best team to play for every game he has a different team
Excuses, excuses, excuses. Like a broken nonsensical record. Patience in football is earned on the basis of seeing progress, and I can see nothing to be patient about with the was this team is being currently managed. Don Raul better pull the finger out and sort this mess out.
He has no man management skills. Or at least players of this level and probably why he didn’t last at PSG. I thought he might grow at Arsenal but all I can see is a guy out of his depth and someone tactically failing game after game. We have been fair so far. But now is not the time for nice manners. We must do better with the players we have. Otherwise Aubamayang, Lacazette, Ozil etc will all be wasted in their primes (Ozil still has the class underneath all this BS) and we won’t have the resources to replace… Read more »
The resource we need to keep them is exactly the same resource we would need to replace them. The “CL”-flavoured carrot. If we don’t have that carrot we are buggered. The problem is that I don’t think Emery even has the management skills to get us the Europa League turd-flavoured carrot this season. Without that we become a truly midtable team with no way back to the top.
It is when you play an encouraging game that the fans will geared the players. You pattern is alien to arsenal fans and totally anti arsenal. And to cap it all you don’t get result, sorry Mr Emery in as much I hate someone to lose their job but you have to leave arsenal for this club to be great again. #Emeryout
Apparently we can’t afford to sack Emery? And if we did? I don’t think there’s any-chance we’d be able to then go and pay compensation to take an employed manager of any substance. That leaves: Wenger Mourinho Enrique Arteta Ljungberg Salari Kovac Allegri Blanc Allardyce Mark Hughes It’s all well and good saying sack Emery…. but surely there needs to be a plan? Because if we payout one manager? There’s absolutely zero chance the Kroenke’s pay out 2…. we need to get this next move right. Regardless of tomorrow’s result, I just don’t see the club making a move, I… Read more »
As blogs pointed out a few days ago, sometimes you need a parting of ways, for a new direction to make itself shown. Indeed I remember Rioch sacking, swiftly followed by some spectacled, French geezer who looked more like a bank manager, than a football one. That turned out alright in the end, but it might not of done. Point is, we sacked Rioch and a new direction opened up. Arsenal has to search for a new way forward, cause Emery 100% is not it.
And just to be clear, the next guy could be worse than Emery (I don’t know how, but I digress), but Arsenal have to keep searching now till we hit the destination and find our new Wenger.
Clacking at straws…he feels the pressure alright…
“Saturday is a very good opportunity, a very difficult match, we know, we are going to prepare and we want to be one step ahead”.
Seems to me Emery has the same script he recites pre-match and another one post-match. We as fans have seen enough to know whether he can improve this team or not, and as things stand now, we can only get worse
Yes they are bad circumstances thats fair but they resulted, with the exception of the attack, due to bad management of those situations. Also with bad circumstances you would still expect to see a system or general game plan and the best players playing in their positions. The structure should still be there. Everyone on the pitch seems clueless, unconfident and badly coached and thats not because of özil or xhaka.
Circumstances which, a lot of them, were created by himself. Taking forever to pick a captain, then making the players vote, then sticking with the elected captain even tho he was underperforming and was an easy target of abuse, playing awful tactics and boring football and freezing our most creative player, etc etc.
He is not daft, I am sure he knows he is living on borrowed time. A shame it has not worked out but the first man to manage the club after AW was always going to find it tough just like Moyes did after Ferguson. Until that happens it would healthier if we laid off the abuse now and tried to get behind the team a bit more. There are fans who will read some of the comments thrown around on here and think it ok to yell them at players at the stadium which is the last thing we… Read more »
Why anyone can dislike your comment is the reality of the fan base we’ve now.
At time of writing 44 people have liked Tony’s comment and 4 people have disliked it. So the reality of the fan base is that the vast majority is pretty level headed and there’s a small minority that are completely unreasonable. Pretty much like society as a whole.
Tbf Not anybody can express their feelings properly. “fuck off” sometimes means “the football at arsenal have been shite for weeks, ive had to watch this while my wife ran away with my two dogs and now im stuck with this misery while people tellin me its a good ebening” tho.
This is utter BS and he is mugging us all off if he thinks we should want to give him patience? How much time does he need? Very disappointed in his thought process here. Pretty scared that nobody above him is pulling him aside and asking him what on earth he is talking about sometimes.
Excuses! And weak ones as that.
Look, I’m perfectly happy to say Kosc is down to Kosc (though this may be unfair – we can’t really say), and then I’m happy to say that you can’t legislate for gangsters trying to stab key players, even if Sead does react like someone’s trying to butter him. But now we’ve had the situation with Xhaka emerge, every player questioned has acted like the captaincy doesn’t have the faintest consequence. You can’t have both.
I sided with the idea that this guys is a bad fit for our club. I can accept that. Not his fault. He coaches and manages in a way that is natural to him. I have no ill feeling against him, just that we should move on from him as I have no doubts at all that we are going backwards and will continue to do so whilst he’s in charge. But this statement, I hate. It’s just excuses. Circumstances like those don’t dictate your basic attitude and approach to football and how it’s played. He has no attacking instinct.… Read more »
I’ll never boo I’ll never call for you to be sacked but the last 8 games of last season and the first 11 games of this season makes me want to boo and you to be sacked !!!
Emery and the coaching staff had all summer to work on this.
So the are
Y
I’m sad that my optimism for Unai, has finally come undone. Infuriating that the man won’t accept any responsibility for some of that emotional balance, he himself created.
Patience is easier if there’s something positive to see, there isn’t
He’s not the right man for the job, but the social media bullying from the fans to the players and the managers is horrible, the owners have to let him go. The thing that’s annoys me the most is he froze ozil out and it was his call to not give Ramsey the contract, two big blunders in my eyes. We’re defo missing a spark in midfield.
ENOUGH FOR ONE AND HALF YEAR. HOW LONG YOU WANT TO WAIT FOR YOU FUCKING EMERY???EMERY OUT???
You are free to hurl abuses but rest assured it does affect players and coach alike and hence affecting performance. Being a little positive will help.
WE ARE SICK OF YOUR FUCKING TACTICS. JUCT LEAVE US ,EMERY???
Emery is full of shit, as well as being a shit manager
Patience is when u see improvement on the pitch every single week despite a few minor setbacks here n there. But the more i watch this team play, the more im convinced it’s going down south than anything else. Shit from the last 10 games from last season, and shit from the start till the last game. Plus it doesn’t help when u hv unrest situation with ozil, xhaka, torreira and our 2 forwards whose contracts seems to stall atm. Enough of this shit.. This is worst than getting any kind of illness. Emery Out.
Most of the problems he is taking about could and should have been avoided by him in the first place. Players leave. But we can be decisive in terms of replacing their roles. He took monnnnths to sort the captaincy, and ended up with a wierd structure and a poor choice. If this issue has really been affecting us that much (which I don’t buy) then he is still firmly accountable for it, as his crap man management has let things get like this. In reality, these are excuses and he hasn’t a clue how to turn us around. He… Read more »
God it must be frustrating transcription his interviews.
Emery’s Line Up against Leicester:
Auba Torreira Chambers
Kola Guen Ozil Maitland Niles
Mustafi Sokratis Luiz
Leno
Emotional balance? Oh, no …. this is gonna be a long and difficult season.
I love lamp.
…and my dog ate my homework
The problems with the team’s performance seem quite simple to fix. – We are a highly talented team offensively with Laca, Auba and Pepe as the front three. They should start every EPL game. – The offense has been playing poorly because we seek to cross the ball from the wing on almost every attack. Consequently, we’re predictable to the opposing defense. We need to attack through the center of the pitch as often as we play it out to the wing. Therefore, it’s essential to start Ozil since he’s the only player who can break the defense down with… Read more »
Dave, I completely agree with your assessment. However, I would like to add a slightly deeper tactical answer to the obvious question: Why on earth hasn’t Emery already done this? PAL + Ozil most naturally lends itself to a 4-2-3-1 formation. ——AL—— PA—MO—NP etc. Both wide players would be cutting into the box to offer an attacking threat, a strategy which requires full-backs to press high up the pitch to create width in attack. Kolasinac, Tierney, Bellerin and Maitland-Niles all favour this attacking approach. So, now we have: ——AL—— PEA–MO–NP —XX—XX— KT-XX-XX-HB This system requires two midfielders who can fill… Read more »
To all you crazies who want Mourinho in….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EovwYn0VAr0
Really, really difficult circumstances. You know, world beaters like Watford, Sheffield, Man United, Crystal Palace……
Emotional balance? You’re a football manager Unai, not a bloody Occupational Therapist! This constant deflection of the real issues with smoke and mirrors has gone on long enough… I don’t beleive I have ever heard him simply front up and take responsibility (without some equivocation). Koscielny, Bielik, Ramsey et all left because he ‘deemed them surplus’. The captaincy post Kos was a farce entirely of Emery’s own making. The ‘real life’ issue with Ozil and Kola is something that can happen – to anyone and everyone… it’s life, manage it, process it, move past it – as Kola has done.… Read more »
I hope the Board is not buying into these kinds of arguments. We needed a qualitative change after AW. But what we got was a downgrade. AFC and the fans deserve better.
Regardless of everything, we are playing shit football
Oh cry me a river. The captain left the club and we had to name another. Terrible, terrible circumstances. He created this problem, full stop.
Excuses….
Cant we please just get Allegri in while he’s still available??
Knowing the Arse, we’ll leave it just too late and have to settle for Josė or someone.
Words from a desperate man. It is like he is getting his excuses in before the game even kicks off. If the inevitable happens he should be sacked. With the chavs likely to win we would be 9 points off the top four. The longer he stays the larger the gap will become.
My problem with sacking Emery is to find a better manager. I cannot see one of the world’s biggest clubs experimenting with Ljungberg or Arteta. Neither does crazy José come around as a good alternative. Better alternatives would probably not be available until the summer. I think Emery plays too defensively. His team lays too low on the pitch. His inspiration is Barcelona 15 years back. In reality, his team plays very much like the later Wenger. But football has moved on, luckily. Now it’s all guns blazing, like Leicester and Liverpool (and sometimes Bayern). Still, there is no simple,… Read more »
We had so much patience with Arsene because we had trophies to remember, we’re are we heading aubamayang and lacazette will loose any ambition at this rate, we don’t need patience we need results, otherwise emery is not good enough, nice man but Arsenal is too big a job
I can’t believe he just blamed the fans for him being awful.
Also
“If Laurent Koscielny was still here, the captain would be Koscielny and that would give us no problem”
Again showing his lack of emotional intelligence! There clearly was already a problem with Koscielny behind the scenes that you failed to address and it ended up blowing up in our faces!
He is putting the blame on the players now! What’s next?
The man who cannot find a captain in 18 months is asking for patience
Wenger had Arsenal supporter’s patience. He had earned it. They gave him all the patience they had. Rght now, they have no more to give, not to Emery or any other coach after him. So, Emery had better forget about rotation, pick his best eleven and give it his best shot. If he feels that circumstances are too difficult for him, then he should quit. Football supporters are like restaurant customers. They want good food, and for a restaurant of Arsenal’s stature, the best food! It doesn’t matter to them how hot it is in the kitchen or, whether the… Read more »
This negativity is not going to help him. Is he looking for sympathy from the fans? What’s his excuse for the fact that this goes way back before this season even started? He’s been given resources and we are still seeing really horrible stuff. If he really believes his own excuses and the board are reading this, how can they possibly allow it to continue?
If Emery is sacked next week, here is a list of 10 potential replacements that I can think of (not in order of preferences): 1. Mikel Arteta 2. Freddie Ljungberg 3. Max Allegri (can he speak English?) 4. Marcelinho (can he speak English?) 5. Eric Ten Hag (hard) 6. Niko Kovac 7. Jose Mourinho (don’t want to, but he’s available) 8. Rafa Benitez 9. Julian Nagelsmann 10. Joe Montemurro Personally I’d go for Joe Montemurro as he’s already integrated to Arsenal’s values, great tactician and good man (woman) management. I’d give him a temporary run with Freddie as assistant manager.… Read more »
We call for emery’s head but are we ready for more catastrophic results after?
Even with freddie/arteta at the head? How long before we complain again and ask for change.
We will be a failure like utd because the board/owner doesn’t have any sporting interests in football and we have no long term vision.
The results and the football couldn’t be much worse, and at least Freddie and Mikel know the club and what type of football is required. They are also both highly intelligent and respected young coaches, they are articulate and would have a lot of goodwill. Leaving this situation to fester because a so-called premium coach may not be available would be as cowardly a decision as employing Emery was in the first place. You don’t get far choosing a bog standard mid table grafter as the safe option. Maybe backing the exciting up and coming young coach is taking a… Read more »