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Arteta leveraging his positivity stick to reboot The Arsenal

Suburban Gooners Logo Suburban Gooners Logo Eight goals in around 80 hours between Saturday and Tuesday has a Gooner like me rather excited right now. I seem to have eschewed my normal glass half empty mantra, which has been replaced with a really positive vibe about The Arsenal looking ahead to this weekend’s game against West Ham. Of course, the feelings could be very different come 7.30pm on Saturday, but what I’ve seen from this Arsenal team since the international break has me proper buzzing.

We’ve had wins already this season, we’ve all been pleased to pick up points, but the manner of these last two wins are the reason for the extra swing in Arsenal fans’ steps right now I’d wager. The prevailing narrative since the start of the season has been a little bit ‘woe is us’ I have to concede; with myself being just as guilty of adding to this particular melancholy bonfire. It’s not been unwarranted; dodgy refereeing decisions, injuries to key players, a couple of shoddy performances and an underlying feeling that the team wasn’t gelling with the new instructions Arteta had given them, all contributed towards the fan sentiment. But in a peverse way, the international break feels like it has offered somewhat of a reboot and my hope now is that we see the Arsenal from the end of last season and for most of the season before.

Sometimes the signs are there. For example, Arteta spoke before the Forest game about how what he’d seen in the previous 48 hours was (I can’t remember the exact words and I can’t be arsed to Google it as I’m on the train tapping away before I lose signal) something like “phenomenal” when he described the atmosphere around the camp. Of course at the time you think it’s lip service; managers have – for so long from time immemorial – always said things like that publicly to put on a brave face. But Arteta has used this kind of ‘ultra positivity’ only in certain circumstances that I can remember. After we were on a losing streak for his first three games of the season the season that we finished fifth three years ago I feel like he said that, plus I’m sure he said something like that post Dubai last season. So he picks and chooses when to bust out the extreme levels of externally-facing positivity, but only after the fact and after we’ve gone on a run of winning games can you see that it is warranted with hindsight.

What we need now, however, is for that positivity and the same energy that we saw in Lisbon, transferred back to London. We don’t get on our travels outside of London until the new year now, so there isn’t the worry about travel, just the need to focus on wins. Liverpool won again last night and whilst it’s in the Champions League and so doesn’t impact us right now, we do need them to start showing some fragility in their results. They’ve got away with a few games and the chips have very much been falling in their favour so far this season (think about how we were leading against them before injuries meant we ended up having a makeshift back four of MLS, Kiwior, White and Partey when they equalised), but unless they start dropping points soon it is very much going to feel like they’re going to be so far ahead that even a slip up won’t matter much.

All Arsenal and Arteta can do, of course, is focus on our own outputs. That starts with West Ham and a West Ham that will be buoyant after a good win against Newcastle at St James’ Park. I watched the game in patches and in it I thought they were quite impressive, but the good news is that in Lisbon I thought we were fantastic, arguably our best performance of the season. Yes, of course there were the goals, but it was in possession that I was so impressed. The way the team were finding space in between the lines, the ’round the corner’ passing of the likes of Partey and Odegaard, the movement off the ball – the performance in Portuagl had everything.

Can we take that form in to the game on Saturday in East London? I hope so. That game on Tuesday felt like the blueprint of how we want to play and I suspect Arteta will be doing a re-watch of that game and asking his players how they can do the same against a very different opponent in West Ham on Saturday. I’ll do a bit of a check-in on how their fans are feeling ahead of that game tomorrow, before we get Arteta’s press conference views at some stage tomorrow ahead of the game.

In terms of other news that is going on, well as you’d expect, there isn’t really too much at all. That tends to happen when you have two important confidence-boosting wins; it all goes quiet and the focus is on the next one and there’s less talking and introspection that goes on. But yesterday’s glory will quickly become tomorrow’s concern as we look at the Hammers on Saturday so I think I’ll park any further thoughts for now and just ‘live in the now’ and keep focusing on the positivity that Tuesday night’s game brought us.

Catch you all tomorrow.

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Gooner born in 1982 from Harlow, Essex, now living in Uxbridge. I say what I see - frequently wrong, but hey, it's just an opinion piece, right? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.