Not really. He had lost the dressing room, so is almost impossible to come back from that. We were also all over the place tactically.
Need to disagree a bit here. Of course, the most important thing is the league position, & we all agree that wasn't very good. But I don't think you can just dismiss form from Xmas. I think by all metrics it shows we are performing better, creating more chances, scoring more goals, conceding less. If we had sacked Arteta after the Burnley defeat & got a new manager in & he got the same results as what Arteta has, you'd be saying that he'd have done a good job, no?
I would be open to giving a new manager more leeway if he had achieved the same results as Arteta as it wouldn't have been his team. However, a similar effort in the Europa to Arteta would be concerning. But the question is hypothetical and there are plenty of things that may or may not have happened if a new manager had come in.
As for performing better, I don't agree entirely. Obviously the results have improved but some of the football has been just as bad as the first half of the season. The Christmas/New Year run was good but some of the teams played into our hands. The Chelsea game was excellent, the Brighton game was a hardfought away win and we tonked a very poor West Brom side. When we came up against a defensive team in Palace, we were utterly dreadful and created virtually nothing. Newcastle tried the same but some poor defending from a corner allowed us to counter them and once we had the first goal, we were fine. I was most impressed by the Southampton game in this period as normally when we go 1-0 down to an early goal, we fold. Next we played United and whilst we had chances, this was again due to them being more open and trying to win the game. I remember Cavani missing quite a few which went in our favour.
Next game, we had a great 44 minutes against Wolves until individual errors started to creep in. Decisions went against us and we looked lost. We followed this up with an abysmal game away at Villa, devoid of quality and chance creation. A 4-2 win followed against Leeds and sounds convincing but their keeper had a nightmare and their playstyle again played into our hands. We did our best to throw the game away by still giving them plenty of chances. Next up was the most one sided 1-0 defeat I have ever seen. Man City played us off the park and we were lucky it was only 1-0. The energy is this performance was poor and we looked beaten from the start.
The next four games saw improved performances. The Leicester game, similar to Southampton away was very very good. An excellent managed win. However, we followed this up with more costly individual mistakes away at Burnley. Granted VAR screwed us in this game as well. We did well in the North London Derby for 80 minutes but nearly proceeded to gift Spurs something, even though they had 10 men. Again, we saw the good and bad sides of Arsenal the next week as we drew with West Ham 3-3. Individual errors and a lack of concentration by both teams. An absolute mess of a game that in some ways, we were lucky to get something from.
We then got pasted by Liverpool badly 3-0. The players looked like they weren't responding to the manager one bit. After that game, we were 10th in the league, seven points off Europa League and ten off the Champions League places. Our eyes were firmly on the Europa League matches. The last eight premier league matches have to be looked at in this context. We played a dreadful Sheffield who were all but relegated. Drew with an awful Fulham and even celebrated a late equaliser. Another catastrophic individual error then cost us the match against Everton. That said, this was another match where we again failed to create meaningful chances.
The last five "wins" can be summarised quickly. Newcastle looked like they were on holiday and happy not to do anything after an early Elneny goal. We beat West Brom fairly easily though this was to be expected. The Chelsea win was a complete gift thanks to Jorginho. In the Palace game, we had no shots on target between scoring in the 35th and 90th minutes. As for today, a pretty standard win today in an end of the season fixture with nothing on it. This end of season form gave us fifteen points and landed us quite close to the European positions. It makes us look like we were in a tight race when in reality, all the eggs were in the Europa League basket.
In some of the games since Xmas, we have performed very well. But we have also had some very poor performances combined with some shocking individual errors. Even in some games where we had won, I came away thinking the opposition had gifted us the games as opposed to us dominating and earning relatively comfortable results. Absolutely, the post Xmas form has been better, but what came before it meant this wasn't too difficult to achieve.
