![]() The fact Southampton are their next opponents, visiting the Emirates Stadium on Friday, should mean a few cobwebs are blown away before the pivotal trip to City in nine days’ time. Arteta did not make such huge strides with this squad in order to throw in the towel by mid-April: as Xhaka suggested, this is the time to reset and work out how best to exploit a still commanding position over the final seven games. None of that changes the fact Arsenal’s two slip-ups have been avoidable nor does it alter the suspicion there was a mental hangover in east London from the previous week’s spiralling. Photograph: Jane Stokes/ProSports/Shutterstock In a truly healthy league there should be little hand-wringing when a contender that has won 23 matches out of 31 drops its level sufficiently to draw a couple.Īrsenal again squandered a two-goal lead during their latest setback against West Ham. It has been a phenomenal achievement to outpace Manchester City to this point and perhaps the more important observation should be that, such is the dominance of Pep Guardiola’s side, any title race nowadays needs two almost perfect contenders. Arsenal remain top of the Premier League and with the title in their hands. In the bigger picture he is probably right. “It is not about the mentality: for sure, it is not,” Xhaka said. While a young side’s callowness in a fight for first place is a go-to explanation for loss of nerve, senior players should set a better tone. Thomas Partey is 29 and schooled in Diego Simeone’s unceasing approach at Atlético Madrid: he should have had no business trying to execute a difficult flick past Declan Rice, West Ham’s best player, deep inside his own half and was promptly punished for his hubris. It will exasperate Arteta that, just as Xhaka’s set-to with Trent Alexander-Arnold shifted the tone a week before, another senior player contrived an avoidable error this time. West Ham are not Liverpool and their ground is hardly Anfield: perhaps Arsenal would be able to declare early and conserve energy as they had in a cakewalk at Fulham five weeks previously. Second-guessing what is going through a player’s mind can be a lazy form of analysis but it was hard not to conclude a measure of complacency had set in. It is understood that, if one were enforced, the clubs would favour it being the Football Association – an independent body but not one constrained by government legislation.What happened next was another lesson that Arsenal have not earned the right to decide when they can cruise. Masters’ address to the clubs was well received, ironing out any perceived inconsistencies, and their attention is likely to turn towards how to change the dialogue around the notion of a regulator. We agree with the thrust but there are some pretty radical proposals there that need to be thought about.” ![]() ![]() Masters said last Friday: “We have to be careful not to damage the Premier League and English football. The reality was that Masters was attempting to tread a nuanced line between showing respect for the review and accepting that the league had to be open to some form of regulation in principle but also, as he put it, warning “we need to be careful of unintended consequences”. Previously, the league had objected to an independent regulator and Masters’ comments were interpreted in some quarters as a shift in position. The primary recommendation was that football needed a strong independent regulator, which was not what the top-flight clubs wanted to hear, and some of them were worried when Masters said in an interview with the BBC last Friday that he supported the principle.
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