Arsenal will face Real Madrid in the quarter-finals of the Champions League when club football returns after the international break, but the Gunners have a mountain to climb if they’re to revive their Premier League title hopes.
Mikel Arteta’s side beat Chelsea in their previous league fixture, but still sit 12 points behind, having only drawn their last two away games at Nottingham Forest and Manchester United.
The Spaniard walked out of an interview after the match at Old Trafford, having initially been irritated after being asked whether he regretted not signing a striker in January.
Former gaffer offers his expertise
Gordon Strachan managed in the Premier League with both Coventry City and Southampton, before spells with Celtic, Middlesbrough and Scotland, and has sympathy for any manager in that situation.
“The only people in the world who get no sympathy about mental health are football managers,” he said. “We’re allowed to batter into them and say anything we want to them.
“As a manager, at that time, your brains are scrambled. At times you’ve got to take a deep breath before you go into these press conferences or post-match interviews, then you have a word with your PR team and say ‘What am I going to expect here? What can I get? What should we prepare?’
“We never had much protection when I was a manager, it was only later on where there was a bit more protection.
“When I look back and see some of the things that I said, you go, ’Oh dear, oh dear, what was I thinking about?’
“The consequences of bad PR can take up so much of your time as a manager. You know that the next three or four days could be dominated by something that was said in the heat of the moment.
“Then you’re trying to make sure everyone understands what you meant, what you said, what you didn’t say. It takes up your time.
“A good PR team and good thoughts before you go in there, it definitely helps. Instead of answering these questions retrospectively on Monday, you should be concentrating on your training alone.”
Arteta’s walk-out
Asked about Arteta’s tetchy interview, Strachan believes the Arsenal boss could have handled it differently.
“It’s quite simple,” Strachan explains, speaking in association with makthavare.se.
“You can actually say, ‘I could have signed two strikers, but that’s not going to guarantee me winning the Premier League, how do you know if I signed these strikers that might have happened?’
“That’s the way I would have gone about it. Signing a striker doesn’t guarantee anything. And you’ll probably say, ‘There are other teams who signed strikers in the window, are they doing any better?’
“There’s tales of loads of strikers being signed by clubs and nobody winning trophies because, let’s be honest, only a handful of clubs and managers are ever going to get their hands on silverware during their career.
“I put Arsenal and Arteta in that bracket, but there’s no divine right to titles for either of them.
“I used to make sure that I knew every question that was getting asked, especially before games. Maybe not so much afterwards, that was harder. But before, I would always want to know exactly what I’m getting asked.
“There were many times where they’ve agreed that they won’t ask a certain question, but they ask it anyway. That’s when I get a bit hoppy. There’s quite a few clips of me going, ‘Right, you’re really doing this?’
“It was a game. I used to try and put the media off track and throw it back onto them. It was like a game of chess. Sometimes they won and sometimes I won. And you could get a bit tight.”
