Arsenal's Title Defense: Arteta Challenges Players to Show Hunger
Mikel Arteta has thrown down an early-season challenge to his Arsenal players, demanding they show the hunger to defend their Premier League crown – and making it clear that Myles Lewis-Skelly will not be sacrificed to fund it.
Arsenal open their title defence at home to Coventry on Friday night, stepping into a campaign they have not successfully defended since the 1930s. History hangs over them, but so does a formidable recent record: 17 wins from their last 18 league games against promoted sides and 45 unbeaten at the Emirates against such opposition since November 2010.
They are expected to win. Comfortably, many will say. Arteta is not interested in that kind of talk.
“We need to breathe and we need to take this organically because it’s going to be a long marathon,” he said on the eve of the new season, fresh from an eye-catching Community Shield victory over Manchester City. The message was clear: last season’s breakthrough is the starting point, not the standard.
“What we need to show is that desire and ambition to be better than what we were last season, a month ago, or a week ago when we played Man City,” he added. “We have the ability to improve, to evolve, and that’s what I sense and I feel around the club and especially around the players.”
The champions know what comes next. A target on their backs, every week, everywhere. Arteta, though, refused to indulge the narrative that Arsenal begin the campaign as hunted men until they prove it all over again.
“Today, no, because we start from scratch and we’re going to have to prove we have the level to go back to that position again,” he said. “But I think that happened in the last three seasons – at some point we were first, at some point we were chasing it, and you never know what’s better.
“You give me the choice, I want to be first, I want to be hunted, and I want to be in control of our future, rather than depending on somebody else.”
That sense of control extends to the transfer market – and, specifically, to Lewis-Skelly. The 19-year-old midfielder, an academy product, has surged into the first-team picture and shone in Cardiff against City, just months after starting the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain.
It emerged this summer that Lewis-Skelly had been offered to Manchester United and Chelsea as Arsenal explored ways to balance the books after paying £75m to sign Bruno Guimarães from Newcastle. Arteta, though, moved to shut down any idea of a late-window departure, insisting he is “100%” confident the teenager will stay.
For the manager, players like Lewis-Skelly are not just numbers on a balance sheet.
“The players that have been raised in our system, and they feel generally that love and that connection with the club, bring something else, there’s no question about that,” Arteta said. “We need to look after them in a really special way because they bring value that is very difficult to find.
“That’s why, when we can, we want to protect those assets as much as possible, develop them and make them extremely important for the club.”
A title to defend, a young core to protect, and a manager demanding evolution, not comfort. Coventry arrive first, but the real battle for Arsenal starts with themselves.
