“Individually, can we do things a little bit better and deliver more quality and deliver the magic moment?”
That was the question Mikel Arteta posed himself and his players in the aftermath of Saturday’s frustrating 0-0 draw with Everton. And with good reason.
While his side dominated the game from start to finish, the Gunners couldn’t find a way to unlock the visitors’ defence and surrendered more points on a weekend when they might easily have made up ground on league leaders Liverpool.
Having watched his side deliver a similar performance the week before at Fulham, serious questions are being asked about the Gunners’ misfiring attack.
Ahead of Wednesday’s Carabao Cup game with Everton, the media returned to the idea of winning games with “magic moments” leading Arteta to define his parameters for the term.
“A magic moment is not only just to score a goal,” he explained.
“A magic moment can be Gabriel Magalhaes last year against Manchester United when he plays the striker [Alejandro Garnacho] offside for millimetres. That’s a magic moment as well in my opinion.
“It doesn’t only have to be scoring a goal, but we have players that are capable of doing that.
“Doing it every three days, that’s when you become a world-class player, a player that wins games with individual actions and we’re trying to develop our players to have more of that because that would be another source of winning games.”
Arsenal have enjoyed a huge uptick in the number of goals they’ve scored in the last couple of seasons – last season’s tally in the league was the club’s highest ever – so you can understand Arteta getting prickly when asked if his side are too reliant on set-pieces.
“That’s always the narrative [when you don’t score],” he said.
“When you score five goals, then another five and another three, you’re not going to talk about it. When you concede, now you don’t have that many clean sheets. When you don’t score a goal you’re going to come back to that. That’s normal, that’s the narrative, but for us it doesn’t change.
“We want to improve regardless of if we score three or five. Even though we didn’t concede anything on Saturday, there are still things defensively I want to do better. It doesn’t change our work.”
So how does he get more attacking “magic moments” from his players. Arteta knows his players have the technical quality but they don’t always seem to have the same belief in themselves. Asked if it’s about mentality, he agreed:
“A lot. Actually, making it happen and believing it can happen again, creating the fear in the opposition that a player or two can deliver that…a player can became, it’s easy to say predictable, I know what he’s going to do, but actually stopping what he’s going to do is something else.”
On Saturday, Arteta’s ‘Hail Mary’ was to send on exciting teenager Ethan Nwaneri in place of out-of-sorts talisman Martin Odegaard. The academy graduate had proved he was worth a punt based on previous cameos but on this occasion couldn’t really get into the game and barely touched the ball.
Interestingly, Arteta thinks Nwaneri, who predominantly plays as an attacking midfielder, could develop into a number 9 in the future – a statement that came out of the blue.
Explaining why, he said: “When he’s got the goal in front of him, he just looks at the goal. He has a tremendous ability to put the ball into the back of the net.”