Mikel Arteta feels that he and his players have reaped the rewards from their week-long training camp in Dubai as he aims to get back to winning ways against Crystal Palace on Saturday.
With a two-week gap between fixtures, Mikel utilised the Premier League’s winter break to head off to the UAE with his squad to build up fitness levels in the warmer climate and strengthen the relationships between everyone as we enter the second half of the campaign.
And having returned to a much chillier Colney, the boss revealed he hopes to see the benefits on and off the pitch for the remainder of the campaign.
“It was great, it was a phenomenal camp in every sense,” he said. “We worked really hard on things that we wanted to do, and we recharged our batteries. The context and the change in environment in beautiful weather helped, and the togetherness and the moments that we shared together were great. We feel fully recharged.
“I think it gave us an opportunity to look at things with a bit of perspective and analyse what we've been doing, and I will take a lot of positives from the first six months of the competition. Even though results haven’t gone our way in the last few games, when you look at what we have produced in terms of the Premier League and any other team, we are up there.
“You have to look at it objectively. In order to do that, you need to dissect the game in as many parts as you possibly can to understand what happened and there is the balance. In football, what you merit and what you actually have are not always at the same level, and that’s been the case.
“But I think overall in the season, where we are, there are things that we can improve on and do better, and those marginal gains have to be installed. They have been installed in the last 10 days and we have to see them coming out.”
As well as the players, some of their families also joined them on the trip to strengthen the family feel with the club, and when pressed about what the highlight of his time in Dubai was, the boss felt that decision made all the difference in forging relationships between players and coaches.
On his favourite moment, Mikel revealed: “The beautiful moments that we spent together. When you have families and kids around, and mixing life and work, I think it’s something extremely necessary.
“We are living our lives and they are living our lives. If we want this to make sense and everybody to be a part of it, I think it’s a really positive thing to do.”
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
