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Football London
Football London
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Art De Roche

Mikel Arteta addresses Arsenal's unbeaten record in 2020 and his plans for the future

Mikel Arteta insists that everybody at Arsenal has bought into his vision for the club which has helped him make such vast improvements.

Despite being appointed head coach just two months ago, the 37-year-old has made noticeable adjustments to the side that have done the world of good.

From the first days of his tenure, he had set his stall out. Each player would have the chance to prove themselves to him, they'd all have to contribute 100% to the way he wanted them to play and anything that came short wouldn't be good enough.

Since then, he has been able to sure up the defence, mould players into unfamiliar positions astoundingly, create structures of play and finally, he seems to be getting the wins he craves. The young coach puts all this down to the players meeting his aforementioned demands.

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"Honestly, we feel as a staff that the players are willing and are behind us and want to follow us," Arteta said.

"You try and convince them about what we are trying to do and they are doing every thing they can to always try and execute what we are doing and the energy we have together is good so I am happy.

"The attitude I want the players to play with is to confront the opponent. It does not matter where we play, we have to go there and we have to face them.

"We have to feel that we are ready to go, not just when we have the ball but when we don’t have it as well, with the same attitude and aggression. They are doing it. I can only praise them because they are trying hard - sometimes we can be better or worse but they are very willing."

In his 11 games in charge of the Gunners, Arteta's imprint has been clear in every single one.

From the patterns that have been set down the left flank to free the left-back/left winger, the positioning of Granit Xhaka and David Luiz that begins that process and the organisation off the ball, it has been a rapid improvement from the Unai Emery days.

Although Arteta is pleased to see how quickly his coaching has impacted an Arsenal side that was immediately recognisable as his side, he was also keen to stress that his work is not finished just yet.

"Yes but we have a long way to go in this process, to develop a lot of things that I want to implement.

"We need time. I don’t want to accelerate the process and take them somewhere they cannot do because it would not be productive. We have to maintain the things we do good and maybe then we have little margins of improvement that we have to aim to achieve."

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