Freddie Ljungberg wants Arsenal's senior players to extricate the Gunners from the mess they're in rather than rely on the youngsters he knows so well.
Two games into his interim tenure as Arsenal head coach Ljungberg's side have largely borne the look and feel of his predecessor Unai Emery with Joe Willock the only graduate of the club's Hale End academy to start both games under the Swede.
Ljungberg, who coached the Arsenal Under-23 side last season, had been expected to lean heavily on the highly-rated crop of youngsters that followed him to the first team set-up over the summer but Reiss Nelson and Bukayo Saka have both been left out of matchday squad whilst Emile Smith Rowe is yet to feature since the change of head coach.
However with Arsenal, winless in eight, on their worst run of form since 1977 Ljungberg does not want the burden of reviving the Gunners' fortune to fall on youngsters and will instead look to his more experienced squad members to start a revival when they travel to West Ham on Monday night.
"I haven't said I'm going to build the team against specific players but I felt I want to play the experienced players when it's such a difficult situation like it is at the moment," Ljungberg said.
"[I decided not to] pick all the young players that are going to change the future of this club. I made a conscious choice to put down the older players to take the responsibility and change the games."
Even those young players that have started have had their difficulties under Ljungberg. Willock, whose positioning as a No.10 has forced Mesut Ozil to play out wide, was hauled off after 45 minutes in Thursday's 2-1 defeat to Brighton and Hove Albion.
Willock's appearance seemed to leave both his head coach and team-mates unimpressed - Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang reacted furiously when the 20-year-old misplaced a through ball - as Nicolas Pepe took his place at the interval.
"Of course it is [a difficult balancing act]," Ljungberg said of Willock. "I had Joe on the pitch because I wanted power and speed. He has something that we don't really have in the squad.
"But Joe was passive like everyone else. I felt I would make a change and we had Nico to get his chance to show and I thought he did that well.
"He showed intensity, he tried to dribble and he worked defensively well to get the ball back. So that was a positive."
Ljungberg insisted that Arsenal "need to change this downward spiral" which perhaps hit its nadir in a 2-1 defeat at home to Brighton and Hove Albion which saw the Gunners blow a chance to close a 10 point gap on Chelsea in fourth, with five teams sitting between them and a Champions League qualifying berth.
The Blues 2-1 defeat to Everton has at least provided an opportunity for Arsenal to reel in their rivals when they travel to the London Stadium to face West Ham, another side struggling for form. However both Tottenham and Manchester United have leapfrogged Ljungberg's side in recent weeks.
Still the Gunners, nearer the relegation zone than top four, are not conceding defeat.
"I don't think we should stop talking about the top four," Ljungberg said.
"But for us it's about concentrating on what we're doing here now and not look up, down, sideways. We just need to work on our own game and our own confidence."
