By his own admission it took Mikel Arteta some time to make friends with the face that stared back at him as he raked over last season’s title race. The first few weeks of summer were a period of intense self-scrutiny and, ever the perfectionist, he required complete certainty that he liked what he saw.
“The first thing you have to do is look in the mirror and understand: ‘OK, is there something you should have done better, done differently?’ And if that’s the case learn from it,” he said. “And then judge yourself: are you the right person to drive the club, the team, forward in the way you want and do you have that energy and belief that you want to do it?”
