For most of last season, the loudest criticism aimed at Mikel Arteta had nothing to do with results.

Arsenal were winning, but they weren’t winning in the way people felt Arsenal were supposed to. The set-pieces, the time-wasting, the games where they’d take a 1-0 lead and then sit on it — rival fans hated it. And sometimes, even their own fanbase have criticised it.

Former Premier League manager Sean Dyche, though, thinks it was the smartest thing Arteta did.

Sean Dyche says Mikel Arteta was right to rip up the Arsenal ‘philosophy’

Speaking to Jeff Stelling on OLBG, the former Everton and Burnley boss argued that Arteta deserves a lot of credit for the thing he got hammered for, which was being willing to abandon an idea that wasn’t delivering silverware.

“Arteta is a great point. For me they’ve given him time. Now last season he probably had to win something,” Dyche said. “We all know that because they had eventually gone, look, we’ve put in, I don’t know, a billion pounds and you haven’t won anything. But he did win something and I’m the first to say in my opinion, brilliant management because they got to Christmas and everyone knocks it. They’re not playing the Arsenal way, but guess what? They wanted to win and he got the job done.

Dyche says he’d love Arteta to just come out and admit it, because he reckons the game needs to hear somebody say it out loud. “I’d love him to come out and actually go, ‘Yeah, I ripped up all that philosophy stuff because I knew we needed to win and we needed to find ways to win’, because that would have really been cleansing, I think, for the game, because all year now is philosophy, philosophy, philosophy. You see teams losing every week, you know?”

He’s got a point, and Arsenal fans have the Premier League title to now back it up. Arteta spent the last couple of seasons being told his side were too cautious, too reliant on set-pieces, too far removed from the football Arsene Wenger used to put out. Then he won the league and reached a Champions League final by doing it his way.

Ironically, though, Arsenal are yet to score from a set-piece yet this season, and the Gunners are suddenly passing teams to death instead. That probably has something to do with having the likes of Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard and Kai Havertz fully fit again.