The potential for Mikel Arteta and his players to Arsenal things up

Deadlocked with cuddly north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur on 54 points but with two games in hand, Arsenal look to be in the box-seat to take fourth place and the place in Big Cup that comes with it next season. Look to be, except with the caveat they are Arsenal … albeit a version that has come a long way from the side that lost against Brentford on the opening night of the season. They went on to provoke much tittering among the punditocracy with defeats in their next two games, leaving them with a UK-at-Eurovision-esque “nul points” going into the season’s first international break.

Well who’s laughing now, the Fiver might ask. And while the answer, as usual, will almost certainly be “not Fiver readers!”, we might also include Mikel Arteta, whose dogged insistence that we should all “trust in the process” has turned out to be correct. And where once that process might have seemed a mite indefinable, it turns out it involved nothing more complicated than getting a few well coached old pros and lots of exciting young tyros to gad about in a specific way. And last Thursday, following the return of his players from international duty, Arteta stressed the importance of getting their heads back in Arsenal’s particular game.

“I will have them all here today, just try to refocus them – obviously, when they’re on international duty all the time they’re being asked to do different things, different roles, different kind of pressures,” Arteta trilled. “For some of them, it was their first international, so emotionally for them as well it’s very draining. And make sure that everyone is fine and look forward to the challenge that we have ahead.”

With 10 challenges ahead for Arsenal before the end of the season, the first will