Speaking on the Gary Neville Podcast, the former Manchester United right-back has urged Mikel Arteta to get his Arsenal team looking like they’re enjoying their football.
To be fair, we wouldn’t blame any Arsenal player for not enjoying their football right now, after all, the Gunners are dangerously close to the relegation zone, and even some club legends think they could go down.
However, Neville says that there’s no excuse for looking uninspired when you’re on the pitch, which is a point that we certainly understand.
“It just looks now very drab, that’s the one thing I think Mikel Arteta’s got to say, if you watch this Leeds team, there’s a massive enjoyment in the players, and how they play,” Nevile said about the Gunners.
“I think Mikel Arteta’s got to do one thing in the next few weeks, the results may not come, the performances may not come, but he’s got to make those Arsenal players look like they’re enjoying themselves.
“They just don’t look like they’re enjoying themselves on the football pitch, watching that game (vs Everton), I saw a team of players who looked like they were toiling and struggling with the fact of, maybe the way they were being asked to play, or whether they didn’t believe in the system, maybe they didn’t think the players alongside them weren’t good enough. Something’s not right.”
Neville is right that the Arsenal players need to look more up for it, but it’s hard to look like you’re enjoying yourself when you’re losing every week.
Yes, it would be good to see the Arsenal players start the game with some positivity in their body language, but who can blame them for being down at the moment?
It’s not as easy as Arteta saying to the team ‘look like you’re enjoying it’, because the reality is that it’s not been enjoyable in recent times.
The only way to make it more fun is to play more expansively and start picking up more results, and those two things look less and less likely as the weeks go by at Arsenal.
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