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Loss of Water Breaks Have Led to Mikel Arteta Downfall at Arsenal

mikel arteta water breaks

Mikel Arteta must be as perplexed as every Arsenal fan. Where exactly has it all gone so wrong over the last month or so, during which time Arsenal have taken just one point from four league games and plummeted down the Premier League table, to such an extent that the club has now made its worst start to any league season since 1980-81?

Various factors have been cited as possible explanations, but perhaps the answer is as simple as this: Mikel Arteta is missing the water breaks that were introduced after the initial Coronavirus lockdown, which he maximised and which were arguably instrumental in his winning the FA Cup.

Removal of Water Breaks Have Led to Downfall at Arsenal Under Mikel Arteta

Football After the Initial Lockdown

So much has happened and indeed continues to happen in 2020 that it can be difficult to keep up with it all.

But it is worth remembering the unique conditions that existed in football when it returned last season in the early summer, after the initial period of lockdown/quarantine in the spring.

To try to ease the pressure on players as they worked through the huge backlog of games that had built up during that initial lockdown, two temporary – but very important – changes were made to Premier League football – which Arteta arguably benefited from more than anyone else.

The first was the introduction of water breaks midway through each half so that players could take on extra fluid to rehydrate while playing in the warmer summer months.

English weather being what it is (i.e. not that hot, even in summertime), it is arguable that there was never any real need for such water breaks.

Nevertheless, they were duly introduced and Arteta, like every other manager, sought to make the most of them. And as a new manager, one who had only ever been a No.2 (to Pep Guardiola at Manchester City) before taking charge at Arsenal, Arteta perhaps gained more from them than older and more experienced managers.

Four Quarters, Rather Than Two Halves

What the introduction of water breaks effectively did was temporarily alter the structure of football matches. For a period, football ceased to be “a game of two halves” and became a game of four quarters.

As a result, every manager, including Arteta, had twice the previous number of opportunities to communicate directly with his players.

For a novice manager such as Arteta, this may have been particularly important, as it allowed him, relatively quickly (and certainly more quickly than would normally have been the case) to identify any errors or deficiencies in his team’s play at the start of each half.

Much has been made of Arteta’s tendency to “micro-manage” players from his technical area.

The irony is that the Arsenal players, especially the younger ones such as Kieran Tierney, Rob Holding and Bukayo Saka, might well have gained a lot from such micro-management during the summer water breaks, when Mikel Arteta could reinforce his messages about tactics and positional play in a way that he would not normally have been able to do.

And Five Substitutes, Not Three

In addition, the other temporary change that was allowed after the initial lockdown, namely the use of five substitutes rather than three, may also have helped Arteta in his first few months at Arsenal. By having an extra two substitutes to work with, Arteta could again exert a much greater influence on a game than he would have been able to do in normal circumstances.

Put simply, for a new manager learning on the job, the unique conditions of post-lockdown football, in which there were twice as many opportunities to talk to players (during the water breaks in each half) and 40% more opportunity to make substitutions than normal, may have been enormously helpful for Arteta, and certainly more helpful than was realised at the time, perhaps even by Arteta himself.

If that was the case, then Arteta certainly made the most of those unique conditions, as his most successful period by far at Arsenal was at the prolonged end to last season and the start of this season (after the very short summer break).

In that time, Arsenal not only beat Manchester City and Chelsea in the FA Cup but also beat Liverpool twice in a matter of weeks, first in the Premier League and then in the Community Shield.

Mikel Arteta Now Struggling With Water Breaks Gone

Of course, those temporary changes – the use of mid-half water breaks and the increase in the number of substitutions per game from three to five – ended at the start of this season, much to the chagrin of many managers, including Jurgen Klopp, who has particularly complained about the reduction in the number of substitutions and cited it as a major reason for Liverpool’s current injury problems.

But it is possible that Arteta has suffered from the reversion to the old status quo far more than Klopp or any other manager.

He now has only the half-time break during a match to get any message across to all his players collectively. (however much he cries out or gestures during a game, he cannot attract the undivided attention of all his players at once, as he can at half-time and as he used to be able to during the water breaks.)

And he can now make only a maximum of three changes to his team during a match, rather than the five changes that he was able to make during the summer.

Is Arteta Only an “Impact Manager”?

Considering whether Mikel Arteta is missing his water breaks, and the greater number of substitutions allowed after the first lockdown, might seem trivial, but it relates to a much wider point about managers and their experience, or lack thereof.

Now that Arsenal’s results have declined so dramatically, many Arsenal fans (doubtless including many who lauded Arteta in the summer, especially after the FA Cup win) are complaining that he should never have been appointed in the first place, precisely because he lacked any managerial experience whatsoever, a deficiency that is only exacerbated at a club of Arsenal’s magnitude, where the fans’ demands and the media glare are so much greater than at most other clubs.

The fear is that Arteta, especially at the start of his managerial career, is only an “impact manager”, that is to say a manager who can only have a major effect on a club or a team for a strictly limited period of time, just as an “impact player” (like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at his peak, or, to use an example from Arsenal’s own history, Kanu) is usually far more effective when coming off the bench than they are when starting a game.

The history of football is littered with examples of such “impact managers”, who have achieved extraordinary success almost immediately but then overseen an almost equally extraordinary decline in results afterwards.

Perhaps the two most famous examples of “impact managers” in English football are the two who won the European Cup/Champions League with English clubs, namely Tony Barton with Aston Villa in 1982 and Roberto Di Matteo with Chelsea in 2012.

Both men took over top teams (indeed Villa were still reigning champions in 1982 when only League Champions were allowed to enter Europe’s premier club competition) and galvanised them sufficiently for about six months to win the greatest prize in club football (and Di Matteo, it should be noted, also won the FA Cup for good measure).

The Impact of ‘Impact Managers’ Soon Wears Off

However, in both cases, there was also a long and sustained drop-off afterwards, presumably in part because the players were no longer responding as dramatically to their new manager as they were at the beginning.

Barton lasted for two years at Villa before being replaced, whereas Di Matteo did not even see out 2012 as the Chelsea manager.

And, significantly, neither Barton nor Di Matteo ever achieved anything in their subsequent managerial careers that came close to the almost miraculous feats they achieved in their first few months.

That is the fear among many Arsenal fans about Mikel Arteta now, that he will become the Gunners’ own equivalent of a Tony Barton or a Roberto Di Matteo, having achieved remarkable instant success (which was perhaps aided by the unique conditions in which he first became a manager) but then subsided into a depressing run of draws and defeats that seems to have sucked the life out of his team and even perhaps himself.

Arsenal’s ‘Graveyard Slot’

For now, Arteta’s credit at Arsenal, which was largely built up by winning the FA Cup and the Community Shield, remains just about high enough for him to remain as manager.

However, even if he is still a novice as a manager, Arteta will already know that ultimately it is results that will determine whether he will remain as manager, starting with the result of the match against Burnley on Sunday night.

At the start of the season, Arteta and Arsenal fans, in general, would never have imagined that such a game would be a “relegation six-pointer”, but with Arsenal currently 15th and Burnley currently 18th (and therefore occupying the last relegation place) that is effectively what it is.

Arteta must adapt to the new – i.e. the old – conditions in which he is now managing, whereby there is only the half-time break to get his message across and a maximum of three substitutes to use during any one game.

In addition, he must also adapt to the new and unique predicament that Arsenal find themselves in, whereby the late Sunday evening kick-off has almost literally become their “graveyard slot”, as they have lost their last three home games, all of which took place at that time.

To have a kick-off on a Sunday evening in the Premier League is another consequence of the backlog of games created by the initial lockdown and one that, unlike water breaks and the use of five substitutes, has remained, at least for the time being.

Hopefully in 2021, with the advent of mass vaccination and the eventual return of fans to stadiums en masse, such family and travel-unfriendly kick-off times as 7.15 pm on a Sunday will come to an end. For the moment, though, they remain and starting this Sunday against Burnley, Mikel Arteta and his Arsenal team must find a way to win one.

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