What must Unai Emery do to keep his job?

I, along with most Arsenal fans, would understand the logic behind relieving Unai Emery of his duties as Arsenal manager right now. The club find themselves 8 points adrift of the top four spots of the Premier League with 4 wins, 5 draws, 3 losses, and a total of 17 points to their name. It’s the lowest position the Gunners find themselves in, after 12 games, for 37 years.

As a result, the morale of the team is at rock bottom and the atmosphere amongst the fans is as toxic as ever. If it gets any more toxic, we’ll end up with Extinction Rebellion protesting at the stadium to prevent such pollution from smothering the sun.

However, given the club have given their “full backing” to Emery, should we expect to see him on the touchline much longer? Or was that just a case of the board issuing the classic ‘dreaded’ vote of confidence? Personally, the statement reads more as a final warning than a public show of support.

So, what must Unai Emery do to keep his job?

First and foremost, Arsenal need to win. The next six fixtures are Southampton (h), Eintracht Frankfurt (h), Norwich (a), Brighton (h), West Ham (a), and Standard Liege (a). You can argue the hardest match from all of those is against West Ham but seeing how low the Hammers’ confidence is right now, we should be winning all of those matches… comfortably. Although a single goal victory in all of those might appease the board, because ultimately 3 points are 3 points, the fans will be wanting to see so much more from Emery and the players.

We should be blowing the likes of Southampton, Norwich, and Brighton away, and I strongly believe we have the personnel to do it. A minimum of a 2-goal deficit victory will go a long way to slowly getting the fans off the players and Emery’s backs. Decent performances and results will instil much needed confidence going into each game. But in order to do that Emery has to release the handbrake. He must stop setting up his team to nullify the opposition’s strengths, and instead, focus on allowing our players to get the best out of themselves.

We have world-class strikers in Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette who need to be fed. Pick up the fucking spoon Unai and feed them the Michelin 3-Star Pumpkin and Courgette soup they so thoroughly deserve! And we all know Mesut Özil is the spoon… or the soup… does it even matter? They just need service for goodness sake.

Allow Nicolas Pépé to pick up the ball facing towards the goal and drive behind the last line of defence then just bask in the glory of the devastation he leaves behind him. But for this to happen, Emery has to do something he hasn’t done all season and that is start Aubameyang, Lacazette, Pépé, and Özil all together. As long as you have Lucas Torreira and Mattéo Guendouzi (or possibly even Xhaka???) sitting deeper in midfield then Özil is the perfect player to get the best out of those front three… and it’s usually against lesser teams where the German wizard flourishes.

Can we do it?

Under Emery we have the capability of playing attractive attacking football and you only have to look at last season for evidence of that. In victories such as the 5-1 win away to Fulham, 3-1 at home to Leicester, and the exhilarating 4-2 win over Spurs. We displayed hunger and drive in attack by pressing aggressively high up the pitch. That’s exactly what we need to do in these next 6 matches. Do that and it helps lift the cloud of doom currently looming over the Arsenal fans. It also gives a much-needed boost and helps our chances going into tougher tests against Man City, Chelsea, and Man Utd.

If we do anything other than win in the majority of the next 6 fixtures then I can’t see Unai Emery keeping his job. As simple as that… it’ll be Good Ebening… and Goodnight for the Spaniard.