Mikel Arteta gave a great answer when he was asked about his dual goalkeeper policy at Arsenal, only fully manifested after David Raya replaced Aaron Ramsdale for Sunday’s 1-0 win away to Everton:
“I am a really young manager. I only have been three and a half years in the job and I have few regrets. One of them is that on two occasions I felt, after 60 minutes and after 85 minutes, in two games in this period, to change the ’keeper and I didn’t do it. I didn’t have the courage to do it… I was so unhappy.
“Tell me, why not do it? Why not? We have all the qualities in another goalkeeper to do something, something is happening and you want to change momentum. Do it. It is a regret that I had. And now my feeling is to get everyone engaged and in the team, they have to play, regardless of the competition. That is my message.”
It’s a great answer in theory.
Arteta seems to be positioning himself as a great disruptor, someone going against the orthodoxy that says you must have a first-choice goalkeeper and a clear backup, that two ’keepers fighting for one spot week to week simply won’t work, because it’s never worked in the game before.
Raya and Ramsdale will be rotated, says Arteta (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
It’s fascinating, looking from the outside, to consider whether this is going to be a success.
Is Arteta a brilliant innovative thinker, spotting a thing nobody else has and taking advantage of everyone else’s old-fashioned attitudes? Or is he a needless fiddler, changing something for the sake of changing it, not stopping to think that conventional wisdom might actually be right, that the reason barely anyone else has done this is because it actually doesn’t work?
Essentially: is he Steve Jobs, the brains behind Apple and any number of devices you probably own that have changed the way you live your lives? Or is he a far more harmless and likeable version of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto investor who people thought would change the world but who is about to go on trial for fraud and who recently described himself as “one of the most hated people in the world”?
Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t.
Those of us who aren’t Arsenal fans have the luxury of just being able to sit back and watch.
