Farewell Mikel Arteta, hello Ross Barkley?

by Jonah Loeb

A friend of mine, an Arsenal supporter, sent me an e-mail about fifteen minutes after Mikel Arteta’s £10m transfer to Arsenal went through. It began “Hope you’re holding up OK,” and ended “I feel bad that it went down like this.” Those two sentences anticipate perfectly the reaction in the Everton camp to Arteta’s departure, which has been received like some ugly combination of a messy breakup and a death in the family. There have been tears on Twitter, video tributes on YouTube, and long and poetic eulogies on Facebook for the man they call “the best little Spaniard we know.”

This is not to mock or belittle the reactions of the Everton faithful. Far from it; I watched the videos and shook my head sadly like the rest of us. Mourning Mikel Arteta on video is a peculiar experience, though. Apart from his devastating free kicks, like this blockbuster against Hull City, Arteta is the very opposite of what Football FanCast’s Mike Peters called a “YouTube player” (Blackburn’s Morten Gamst Pedersen was Peters’ prime example). A YouTube player is a player whose ability is considerably less than it appears to be if you only know him through watching YouTube clips, and Arteta is quite the other way around; his goals are sometimes messy, his penalties are hardly emphatic, and his pace is nothing special. Arsenal fans have made plenty of “Welcome to Arsenal” highlight reels, but they’re a better advertisement for Steven Pienaar (a YouTube player if ever there was one) or Tim Cahill than they are for Mikky himself. Gooners who’ve never seen him play must be wondering just what Wenger saw in Arteta.

The fact is that Mikel Arteta is simply always where he needs to be. Whether it’s popping up at the far post to clip Yakubu’s cross past Boaz Myhill or whacking Raul Meireles’ headed clearance straight back into the Liverpool net or hitting a clumsy volley off Ryan Giggs’ hand into the corner of the net. Arteta scores ugly and plays with heart as well as skill. His creative skills are unquestionable, but Arteta is not Cesc Fabregas, nor should he be. If Arsenal fans are expecting the spectacular from him, they will be disappointed. If they expect nothing more than incisive passing, devastating set-piece skills, and a fair amount of injuries, they will deem him a good buy and continue counting their club’s money.

On the Everton side of things, however, there is no time for gloomy sentimentalism, which is tough, because gloomy sentimentalism is the default emotional setting for an Everton supporter. Arteta was brilliant, and he was with the club for six and a half fantastic years, including the pulsating Champions League qualifiers against Villarreal and 2010’s brilliant run of beating Manchester City, Manchester United, and Chelsea over the course of seven consecutive home wins, but he is neither perfect nor irreplaceable.

Everton has no shortage of central midfield players; Diniyar Bilyaletdinov is an attacking midfielder whom Moyes has converted into a winger, but he plays better in the center of the park. Leon Osman has done brilliantly filling in for Arteta during the Spaniard’s many injuries, and Jack Rodwell has been pushed forward more and more from his traditional holding role in the past two seasons. The loan signing of Royston Drenthe and the eventual recovery of right winger Seamus Coleman mean that these players, along with Marouane Fellaini, will be forced to prove themselves in the centre of the park.

Those are classy players, and Everton is a club that, for all of its financial woes, has a great amount of talent. The loss of Arteta won’t destroy them on the pitch; in fact, the opportunities for Jack Rodwell to establish himself as a regular starter or for Ross Barkley to emerge as this year’s Wilshere or Bale far outweigh the ten or so goals that Arteta would score or create this season.

The danger, as ever for Everton, is that self-pity and self-loathing will overcome self-assurance, and that danger is as real and as perilous as any on-field problems. As former England manager Albus Dumbledore once said, “Of course it is happening in your head, Harry [Catterick], but why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Jonah Loeb is a Premier League columnist for Just Football and can be found on Twitter @jonahblues

(photo credit: lisaloulaa on Flickr)

Arsenal, English Premier League, Everton, Mikel Arteta