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They say that if you’re expecting a kick in the swingers but only receive a punch in the face, you can probably consider it a good result. Because he probably wasn’t expecting his Arsenal players to ship a hoof to the collective crown jewels from Bournemouth on Saturday, Mikel Arteta understandably failed to find any positives as he told one post-match interviewer after another that his listless side’s thoroughly deserved defeat felt like “a big punch on the face”. Whatever about their toothlessness up front, devotion to sideways and backwards passes and an at times almost comical inability to beat the Bournemouth press, the manner in which Arsenal’s players seemed genuinely paralysed by terror will be of the greatest concern to their equally terrified fans. Whether the sight of an extremely agitated Spaniard bouncing around his technical area like Basil Fawlty thrashing his Austin 1100 with a tree branch does much to alleviate the cloud of anxiety that has descended upon the Emirates Stadium is open to extremely one-sided debate.
While defeat by Bournemouth may have been a punch in the face, it need not necessarily be a knockout blow. Despite their six-point lead at the top of the Premier League table, each passing poor performance renders those who questioned the mental fortitude of this Arsenal squad before a ball was kicked in August increasingly smug. At the time, their concerns were angrily dismissed as nonsense and part of some imaginary anti-Arsenal agenda by assorted Arteta extremists who have now turned their ire on their own team. Having heard his side booed off on Saturday, Arteta offered up few excuses because there were none. “Apologise, take it on the chin and that’s it,” he sighed, when asked what message he had for fans who had booed off their team. “What I’m trying to do is give our best to the club, give the responsibility to the players. And I know that the atmosphere, the fans, the support, the energy in the stadium is the best in the world.”
