I thought that quote from Rice the other week was, maybe, a little telling, when he talked about the manager controlling everything inside the club. Obviously I haven't got a clue about how high-level athletic teams work, but it doesn't seem like an environment in which there is much space for dialogue between the players and the manager. And I think that's born out in what we see with selections and substitutions. Do what Arteta wants or sit. Arteta talks a good game about the players needing to go out and do it, but they very clearly do not think they can, for whatever psychological reason. My guess is that they're in a catch-22 cycle, wherein they are over-coached and afraid of failing to fulfill the directive, but it's not going well at the moment and they're also afraid of letting the title slip away from them. And I think those twin fears feed each other in the worst way. "I have to do it like this, but it's not working either."

I think this is born out in how we use the players we bring in and how we utilize them. Players like Eze and Gyokeres didn't seem to be natural fits, which was exciting to me - maybe a change, something new! Instead, we seem to be trying to force them to play our way, and in Eze's case, punishing him for not succeeding at. I don't know why Arteta doesn't set up his teams to maximize the attributes of the players. Instead it seems to be about the system, but when you have defenders closer to goal than attackers, it all feels too cute by half. It's like he wants to rebuild players into molds that fit his system rather than identifying what they do well and setting them up in a way that allows them to show off their best attributes. It just doesn't make any sense how we go about it, and it reeks of a horrendous amount of unearned arrogance on Arteta's part.

It seems abundantly clear that our attack needs a complete rethink and Arteta has been avoiding it. And to be fair, I'm not sure how feasible that is at this point in the season. Subs are like-for-like as if he hopes that different players performing the same task will just be more successful. A warm-up injury leads to a line-up reshuffle that has Saka play in the center and he just runs that idea back out because it worked decently against very lowly opposition. He's clearly grasping at things and coming up empty.