Arsenal: Has Unai Emery lost dressing room?

Unai Emery is under increasing pressure as Arsenal head coach. And after Saturday’s 2-2 draw with Southampton, that pressure only intensified. It is now fair to question whether he still has the support of the dressing room.

Alexandre Lacazette scored a last-minute equaliser with a snatched finish in Saturday’s 2-2 draw with Southampton. It came after Arsenal desperately searched for a goal throughout the second half. The Emirates, a highly strung and extremely tentative Emirates, exploded, the release of tension evident to see. But the players on the pitch hardly moved.

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In fact, Lacazette slumped to his knees, arching his back forward, as if he was apologising for scoring as it meant that Unai Emery might have saved his job for another week.

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There was an atmosphere and air to the team that suggested these players no longer believed in what they were being asked to do. When Southampton scored their second goal to take a lead for the second time in the match, the Arsenal heads drooped. Their shoulders slumped, the gaze drifted to the floor, and the belief sapped out of the souls. They had no hope, in large part because of the holes in the system that they were playing.

After the match, it was reported that a heated meeting took place in the dressing room, with some players criticising one another and Emery himself. Edu and Raul Sanllehi, the two men in charge of the whole mess, met with the squad after the match, though did not relieve Emery of his duties, while Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang started his post-match interview with a shrugged sigh of exasperation when asked what is wrong with the team.

This all comes in the aftermath of reports of dissension among the ranks, players not understanding Emery’s instruction, thus adding to the disbelief in his much-loved ‘process’, and several leading characters ‘liking’ social media posts that are critical of other players or Emery himself.

Before Saturday, while the feeling in the stands was one of criticism and caution, the players on the pitch still seemed committed to the cause, as if they still believed in Emery and his vision. But the team looked very different this time around. Their body language was much more pejorative and apathetic; it seemed as if Emery had lost their support.

The old cliche of ‘losing the dressing room’ is often the final straw. Very rarely does a manager go from losing the support of his players to finding some form of recovery. And at present, Emery might well have lost it.

The number of reasons to fire Emery has increased with every passing match. And now it seems as though another can be added to the list: he has lost the dressing room, and this might be the most concerning of them all.