Piers Morgan says that he’s ‘lying on the floor and begging forgiveness’ for doubting Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta last season.
TALKSPORT
Morgan has been a vocal critic of Arteta in the past, branding the manager’s methods ‘weird’ after watching the club’s All of Nothing documentary on Amazon Prime, while blasting the boss over the exit of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
However, this season, everything seems to have changed.
The Gunners are enjoying a heck of a campaign and sit eight points clear at the top of the Premier League ahead of Manchester City and Manchester United who are currently struggling to keep up.
Arteta has been an instrumental part in building Arsenal’s new-look title challengers leading the Talk TV presenter to admit that he got his verdict on the Spaniard all wrong.
Responding to claims he had questioned Arteta, Morgan told The Sports Breakfast: “I didn’t just question him, I said they should never have given him a new contract!
“I did write for The Sun about this because there’s no doubt that Arteta has proved me completely wrong.
“I would argue, in my defence, that at the time I said that we’d just been hammered 3-0 by Tottenham, we went on to lose another three games, we weren’t in any European competition at the time, knocked out of both domestic cups in January and it felt like we were going nowhere.
“Arteta had been in charge for two full seasons and a bit, we’d lost 13 league games in both of those seasons and I honestly felt that this was a rookie manager, out of his depth and that we should have been looking elsewhere.
“Boy, has he proved me wrong because in the next few months he went and got [Gabriel] Jesus and [Oleksandr] Zinchenko from Man City who turned out to be unbelievably good signings, he brought back William Saliba at the perfect time, he’s a world-class centre back and everything seems to have clicked.
“I can only, once again, lie on the floor and beg forgiveness from the great Mikel Arteta for so badly misreading his long-term plan!”
Morgan added: “The moment for me of real life awareness of what Arteta was doing was in the Amazon documentary, which I thought was going to be a total trainwreck and it certainly started that way with Arteta doing ridiculous things like playing ‘you’ll never walk alone’ on a little stereo before getting hammered 4-0 by Liverpool or getting the players to shut their eyes and hold hands. You’re thinking ‘what is going on here’.
“I could see why players like Aubameyang had no confidence in him, but as the series went on there was a moment when he brought in the club photographer, Stuart MacFarlane, before the north London derby that they ended up winning and he just gives the players full-throttle of what it means to play for Arsenal.
“It was an amazing moment and I remember looking at the players then, the photographer and then at Arteta and I felt that there was a spirit building that I’d slightly missed and that actually, with a bit of patience and a longer game that was the moment when I thought, ‘okay, I think I missed that’ and I could see them building an incredible spirit. Not just with the team, but also with the fans.
“Fair play to Arteta, he’s been an absolute revelation.”
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