Lee Dixon has tipped Arsenal to cement their place in the Premier League top four as the potentially season-defining Christmas period of matches goes full steam ahead.
Dixon – who was due to be on punditry duty for Arsenal’s postponed clash with Wolves for Amazon Prime Video – ran the rule over his former team at the halfway stage of the season in an exclusive chat with RadioTimes.com.
He believes credit must go to the club for backing Mikel Arteta’s vision of a young, hungry, developing squad, and he also supports the project Arteta is implementing at the Emirates, though he admits there will be bumps along the road to glory.
“It’s been very up and down, not only performance-wise but expectations-wise, perception-wise, from what people perceive the team should be doing,” he said.
“If you said at the start of the season, before a ball was kicked, on Boxing Day they’re going to be halfway through the in fourth, you would obviously, definitely take that because that’s an improvement. That’s showing we’ve moved to a slightly higher level.
“The football of late, and the development of the team, has been very, very good. My old school thoughts on the club is that ‘fourth is a disaster, we should either be first or second’.
“But we have to modify our expectations ourselves as pundits, as being a fan of a club and an ex-player. You’ve got lots of different viewpoints on where the club should be but I’m a little bit more pragmatic when I look at it. I’d give it a 7.5/10.
“There’s a real challenge on now for fourth place. They’ve earned that right to fight for that spot. I’m excited about that because the fact that we’re challenging for fourth spot is huge improvement from last year.”
Arteta has come under intense scrutiny on a number of occasions throughout his fledgling Arsenal reign, particularly at the start of the season after the club lost their opening three matches of the campaign.
However, the Spanish boss has steered the ship into calmer waters thanks to a crew of enthusiastic youngsters pitching in with bristling performances.
When asked which stars in particular have caught his eye, Dixon believes the youthful team unit itself has been the driving force in recent success.
“It’s very difficult to pinpoint one of them because I think the ability and the togetherness of the group is probably the key to it.
“Last season, we were looking at Emile Smith Rowe and Bukayo Saka basically carrying the team a lot of the time. The team has developed into spreading the load a bit.
“Smith Rowe is not in the team at the moment, he’s sort of flitting in and out and I think that’s a good thing because it enables Arteta to give them a bit of a rest and he couldn’t have rested him really last season because they were everything to the club.
“That’s where the development is pretty obvious because we’re now looking at different areas of the pitch. We’re now focusing on members of the back four, [Takehiro] Tomiyasu and how they’re linking up, the partnership between Gabriel and Ben White.
“I also think Martin Odegaard, he wasn’t disappointing, he just didn’t really set the place alight when last season, but he’s come in now and he seems a lot more settled. We’ve seen a lot more creative stuff from him.
“I like the fact that Arteta is not afraid of throwing the kids out there with structure but I think we’ve all been a little bit surprised that he’s not changed the style of play against certain other teams.
“When you try to coach a set of youngsters a certain way, hammering in playing out from the back and doing the right thing and all this lot, they haven’t got the experience to be able to change it up, and then know when to change it up on the pitch. They haven’t got that experience, that back catalogue of being under pressure and knowing they need to just do this for 10 minutes.
“Sometimes they just keep trying to play through that against the better teams, but sometimes just need to stop the rot and actually do some defending as a block.
“It’s Arteta’s first job. He’s going to get some of those things wrong so I’m not going to criticise him for bad coaching, I’m not a coach, he’s a far better coach and a judge than than I am. But as he goes through his coaching career, he’s going to learn all the stuff that Pep [Guardiola] and [Jurgen] Klopp know now, because they’ve made the mistakes before.
!["Arsenal"]("https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2021/09/GettyImages-1333895179-2ef57d2.jpg?quality=90&resize=553%2C413" "\"Arsenal\"")
“He’s still making those judgments all the time. And he’s a hugely intelligent football person, he’s got a great brain on him and has had some of the best teachers around him. He’s only going to get better.”
Fans have ardently protested against the board this term over their running of the club, but Dixon believes they deserve praise for implementing a plan that is beginning to pay dividends – and not into the top brass’ bank accounts.
“A lot of credit has got to go to the club. Obviously Arteta has got how he wants to build a team but the club have gone down a completely different road and enabled him to sign very young players and he’s created an environment that will be up and down because that’s what you get from youngsters.
“You’re going to get ups and downs. This is a project, this is a plan, you can see that. I think from Arsenal’s point of view when you watch them, you can kind of see what they’re doing. The supporters buy into that.
“If they can see something happening, even though it doesn’t work every week, they kind of go: “You know what, it’s okay, it might be okay next week”. That’s a great position to be in.
“Slowly but surely you iron out the defeats, they become draws and then you start to get some consistency. Liverpool and Man City are miles ahead of Arsenal right now. There’s no doubt about that. Chelsea as well with how they’ve started the season. But, with this progression, with this team of players with Arteta’s project, there is a huge amount of light at the end of the tunnel.”
Amazon Prime Video will exclusively broadcast 10 Premier League fixtures between the 28th-30th December
If you’re looking for something else to watch, check out our TV Guide or our Sport hub for all the latest news.