Former Manchester United and England defender Gary Neville has urged Arsenal manager Unai Emery to stick by his principles despite suffering defeat in his first two Premier League games as Gunners boss.
Arsenal were handed a horrific start to their Premier League campaign, coming up against Manchester City and Chelsea.
Emery has received plenty of criticism for his insistence that his teams play the ball out from the back, but Neville believes that the former PSG coach needs to stay true to how he wants his team to play – even if some of his players are uncomfortable with his style at first.
”He has had six weeks to work. Unai Emery has been a coach for 10 years and has been successful. He has his idea and the players have to adapt to him. He has to find out over this first season which players can adapt to him and which players can’t. Of course he will lose games. In the first season there will be some pain for Arsenal in this transition they are going through. I think it’s dangerous to adapt.’’ Neville said on Sky Sport Monday Night Football.
”I know this from my biggest learning in Valencia. I set off on a path of what I was going to do and didn’t get results. The minute I started to adapt and take people away from my idea and do things different, I threw away the previous three or four weeks of work I’d done.
”If he starts to work on one idea of playing out from the back, but then says knock it long, you start to get confusion in players’ minds. I saw Sam Allardyce’s comments on the radio, but Unai Emery is not trying to get eight points from five games to avoid relegation. He’s trying to build a team to win the title. The last thing he should do, in my experience, which was a bad one, is change and adapt because his players will walk all over him.”
