Arteta a candidate for Manager of the Year- Times of London

The Times London over the weekend posited that Arsenal had a fine season given their starting position of fifth this time last year.

That they had trailed Manchester City all year, but kept a handy 12 or 15 points ahead of Manchester United and Liverpool, as they are now. It would have been hailed as a supreme achievement.

Mikel Arteta would have been considered a candidate for manager of the season, the brightest of futures would have been acclaimed. It was only that they did so well, so early, that this stony end now carries the feeling of failure.

Arsenal ended the campaign in lower mid-table form. Their record over the last eight games reads: W2 D3 L3, which, if spread over the season, would put them where Wolverhampton Wanderers are now. That is why it will hurt so much. Arsenal have been so much better than that to here.

They have been top of the league for a ridiculous 93 per cent of the campaign — the longest run of any club who have not ended up as champions — so, inevitably, this feels like a choke.

It isn’t, of course, given the relentlessness and quality of the team in pursuit. Long before the league table confirmed it, the head-to-head encounters between Arsenal and City revealed the true order.

And, yes, it can be argued that Arsenal could have lost those games, home and away, and still won the league by securing victories against Everton, Nottingham Forest, Brighton & Hove Albion and West Ham United or Southampton. Nerves and fatigue seemed to overwhelm them, flaws in the squad too.

Yet if there is a silver lining — apart from the return to the Champions League with the additional wealth and kudos it brings — it is that the second half of the season should have given the club, and their director of football, Edu, the clearest idea of the shortcomings that cannot be carried into next season. No team inside the top five have conceded more goals than Arsenal, and no champion since Manchester United in 1999-2000. That cannot stand.

The injury to William Saliba was a blow but no team shown to collapse defensively if one man is taken out can be title material next season. There has to be a defensive upgrade. And it’s not just about Rob Holding. Gabriel was unfortunate with Nottingham Forest’s goal but he was unconvincing at other times, and has not filled the gap left by Saliba.

Next season, when Saliba will no doubt play more Champions League matches than he did in the Europa League in this campaign, Arteta cannot have his fingers crossed each week for the continued good health of one player.

Equally, Gabriel Jesus made a big early impact but still went from October 1 to April 1 without scoring. In mitigation, there was a World Cup and an injury in the middle of that run — but it still amounted to a barren spell of 14 games in all competitions, which doesn’t clinch titles either. Jesus has ten goals in 23 league starts and two substitute appearances.

He has been outscored by two players whose teams are in the bottom three: Harvey Barnes of Leicester City and Rodrigo of Leeds United. Hard work is admirable, and Jesus puts in a fabulous shift, but Arsenal need more firepower.

And this is before addressing the obvious shortcomings in midfield. With Granit Xhaka off to Bayer Leverkusen, there appears a tacit admission that Arsenal need to strengthen that area too, with Declan Rice and Moisés Caicedo the favoured candidates. This is essential work.

City are the obvious marker for everybody, but it is fair to assume every club in the immediate vicinity of Arsenal will seek to bolster their squads in the summer and some that have experienced poor campaigns, such as Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, cannot be expected to perform so badly again.

A lot will have changed then; and in Europe too. With City occupying a top seeding spot as either Champions League holders or Premier League champions, Arsenal will be seeded in pot three because, out of the tournament since 2016, they no longer have a sufficiently strong co-efficient to be placed in pot two. Worst-case scenario? Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, perhaps; or Barcelona and Juventus.

Either way, it’s not getting any easier. As crushing as this was, there is no time to wallow in self-pity over what might have been.