Arsenal: Mikel Arteta’s greatest accomplishment is obvious

Mikel Arteta has wasted no time establishing his brand of Arsenal football, but his greatest accomplishment is already thriving as well.

Arsenal may not have gotten the result they would have wanted against Crystal Palace, but it took a lucky deflection to give Palace a point. Otherwise this resolute defense would have kept the hosts out of goal for the full 90 and given us another clean sheet. Oh, what could have been.

But don’t lose track of the things that went gloriously right on the day. Namely, yet again, this defense. And not just any defense, but the ill-fated duo of David Luiz and Sokratis. Who used to chip in about one defensive mistake each in every single match and became the bane of many fan’s existence.

Remember not that long ago, under Unai Emery, how awful these two were? They were hopeless. They were horrible. They exhibited all the failures of this club and carried that weight on their shoulders.

Against Crystal Palace, for yet another sequential match, Luiz and Sokratis were two of the best players on the pitch. They operated tremendously as a unit and when tasked with individual assignments, thrived.

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Sokratis even emerged as the hero of the match when he cleared a ball off the line that would have given Palace a lead that likely would have seen the Gunners walk away with no points.

These two look like completely different players than what we saw under Unai Emery. I still believe that Emery did a lot of things right, but his handling of this defense was shambolic. The entire set-up was awful and it came off looking like we just had shoddy defenders. Luiz and Sokratis just weren’t good enough.

Arteta is showing us that this wasn’t the case. Here we have the exact same defenders and they’ve given up just one goal in three straight matches, and that one was via a deflection.

It’s still early in the Arteta regime, but I’m confident in saying that thus far, his greatest accomplishment is turning this defense around. And there are a lot of accomplishments to choose from. None compare to this. I’m so confident in these two now that it’s crazy. I’m not even missing Calum Chambers as much as I should be.

Which is just another reason why it’s so obvious we are headed in the right direction. Arteta has given us new life where it was long thought impossible.