Sunday’s win over Newcastle means Arsenal will almost certainly finish second in the Premier League for the third year running, and of course people are asking how they might take the next step and land a major trophy.
I’ve been there myself and, while it can sometimes feel very easy when you are always winning things, I know how difficult it is as a player when you keep getting so close without getting any reward.
As well as your own disappointment, you have to deal with all the noise around what has gone wrong – all the doom and gloom about how you have either bottled it or your team is missing an ingredient to make you into winners.
That’s what Mikel Arteta and his players are hearing now, and my Arsenal team had exactly the same issue when we finished second to Manchester United three seasons running without winning a trophy between 1998-99 and 2000-01.
Looking back now I don’t feel any shame in that but, at the time, it was the toughest thing to take.
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Being the bridesmaid so often is the worst feeling in football and it takes a special group to come back from having that happen repeatedly, and win.
I was lucky because I was part of a special group of players at Arsenal, but we still had to work on it.
In the summer of 2001, Arsene Wenger brought in a psychologist who said to us that we were second best because the statistics proved we were.
We weren’t very happy about that, but then he told us that he did not believe that the statistics were telling the truth.
He looked around the dressing room and said we have got World Cup winners in here, and you have all won trophies in the past. His message was that there was more under the bonnet, we just needed to find it.
It was a clever move by Wenger and the parallels in Arsenal’s current position means it is something Arteta could try too, but it can’t all come from the manager – it is down to the players to respond in the right way
I remember being on the Millennium Stadium pitch after we had just lost the 2001 FA Cup final to Liverpool and thinking ‘well this can’t happen again’, and it didn’t.
We came back to Cardiff the following year and beat Chelsea to win the FA Cup then, a few days later, we went to Old Trafford and beat Manchester United to win the Premier League too.