Football NewsIAN LADYMAN: Gunners are lacking direction nearly two years into the Mikel Arteta reign
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One of the many questions Arsenal supporters will be asking themselves is: how long must we wait? 

Mikel Arteta era was always sold as one of gradual improvement. A fundamental reboot of style, attitude and strategy that would take a little while. But where are we with that, 20 months on? The strange truth is that nobody really knows.

Arteta’s squad have been struck by Covid in recent times. Much of what can occasionally be potent about the modern Arsenal was missing.

Nonetheless, they were not good enough or resilient enough to make this a proper contest.

Arteta cut his coaching teeth at Manc City where certain principles underpin all that is pretty about the football. Hard work, toughness, selflessness and micro-organization. The manager will be reminded of all that when he takes his pointless (no insult intended) team to his old place of work next weekend for game three of what looks likely to be a long Premier League season.

There will be no mercy to be found at the Etihad and it already feels as though Arsenal will head into the first international break of the season without a point and bottom of the table.

Arteta continues to say the right things and it is hard not to pull for a coach who clearly wants his team to play the kind of football with which the club have for so long been associated.

But the fact is that nothing he has provided so far – bar the false dawn of an FA Cup win in his first season – has been greatly better than the barren latter years of Arsene Wenger or the short and confusing reign of Unai Emery.

That is why the return of supporters to the Emirates after 18 months was not a cause of celebration as it has been throughout the country but an occasion on which to see for our own eyes what has been happening while the world was shut out for so long.

It always felt as though Arsenal would lose this game. It always felt as though they would be bullied by Romelu Lukaku. It always felt as they would be toothless at the other end. It was a match of men versus boys at the Emirates as it was also a 2-0 defeat that felt worse and for a while looked as though it could be.