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For an elite head coach who isn’t used to seeing his team lose, suffering a rare defeat on the weekend before an international break is particularly hard to take. With the vast majority of your players hightailing it out of Dodge to rack up more air miles than Santa Claus across a decade’s worth of Christmas Eves, the chance to quickly put things right simply isn’t an option. With the first lull of the season set to be longer than any before, the potential for introspection, self-flagellation and over-thinking has never been higher. Luckily, Mikel Arteta has never struck Football Daily as the kind of intense, brooding and meticulous perfectionist likely to spend the next 19 days beating himself up over the monstering his team suffered from Brighton on Saturday. Whether it’s forlornly moving magnets around a tactics board or walking Win the dog around Arsenal’s largely-deserted training ground until her little legs are stumps, we’re confident the Arsenal boss’s every fleeting thought over the next three weeks will not be laser-focused on the manner in which the Seagulls viciously pecked his team of champions into submission and how…
