How Arteta made Arsenal horrible again, with ‘Simeone routine’

BOTTLERS, chokers, shandy-drinking southern softies.

These were the charges levelled at Arsenal when they blew the title last season.

And even if the actual reason they failed was because William Saliba got injured and Rob Holding had to start, Mikel Arteta clearly took those accusations to heart.

If his team are not crowned champions next month, the Gunners boss has categorically ensured that they won’t go down being accused of nicey-niceyness.

Because, as well as being thrillingly entertaining and free-scoring when they want to be, this season’s Arsenal are also thoroughly horrible.

They are not here to make friends. They are not interested in being anybody’s second-favourite team.

And so, six days after stink-bombing the Etihad with a display of Mourinho-esque anti-football for a 0-0 draw, Arsenal turned up at the home of former bogey-team Brighton and s***housed their way to a thoroughly impressive 3-0 win.

How wonderful for the travelling Gooners to witness Ben White — against his former club — going down as if he’d taken a bullet to his neck when Brighton’s Pervis Estupinan brushed against him.

White is renowned as a gentle and decent bloke, intelligent enough to challenge the zeitgeist and claim there might be things in life other than football.

And yet suddenly he’s become some Diego Costa-style anti-hero hate figure, his wife goading the masses by posting social-media pictures of them playing a childish card game on a sun lounger after he’d refused an international call-up.

A man supposedly so ‘woke’ that he refuses to play for England, even after Nike have turned the flag of St George purple.

Yet there he was — the big, bad wolf, cynically feigning injury against his old mates.

Then another former Seagull, Leandro