Opinion: Playing the Arsenal way under Arsene Wenger cost the team Premier League titles

Recently, Arsenal goalkeeper Petr Cech aimed a sly dig at former manager Arsene Wenger for insisting the team play the Arsenal way over the years. The goalkeeper signed for Arsenal on a four-year contract in 2015, for a fee of around £10.9 million.

In a recent interview on arsenal.com, Petr Cech said

"What we lacked in the past… I would say the Arsenal way was more important than getting the points sometimes and this is not sometimes how you win the league. Sometimes you need to make sure you win an ugly game, when you are not playing completely well but you just dig deep, close the back door and win 1-0 no matter how"

You cannot agree more with him. The team seems to have stagnated over the years because of some supposed football philosophy of the Frenchman.

Passing the ball sideways, trying to pass the opponents to submission, or over elaborating the tiki-taka style of football has always been the hallmark of Wenger managed teams, so we can all see what Cech was trying to say here.

The goal keeper also spoke on the mentality of the players towards the objectives for the season. He said,

"We started with the new manager from scratch basically and we try to get this mentality of winning every game, progressing every game, working every day and hopefully we can build this up and win the title sooner rather than later. That will make the big difference"

He spoke on how Unai Emery has been pushing the players to give their best everyday, which from the tone of his statement seems to suggest that Arsene Wenger was too lenient on them as to committing themselves to hard-work.

Unai Emery

He said,

"He is very demanding and I think this is how you improve. I think the place became much more demanding in every way so this is great to see because this is what initially drives everybody forward and gives you the kind of kick that, ‘I’m not doing enough to start the game’ or ‘I’m not doing enough to keep my spot in the game’ because the manager asked for precision and hard work every day.

This is how it should be. We have very healthy competition and we are actually taking the benefit of it"

When you watch Arsenal's training sessions, you can really see the basics that Emery and his crew are drilling the team on. I had never seen a training session under Wenger having such personal one-on-one drills with the players, and this is evident with the results lately.

You can only hope that this team will get better and better as the season progresses. Once he gets the balance right between attacking and defending, one can imagine that the team will begin to fire on all cylinders. Let the Unai Emery revolution continue.