Arteta calls Arsenal's defending 'naive' after Villarreal loss
Arsenal were naive in their defending and paid a painful price, manager Mikel Arteta said after his side's 3-2 friendly defeat against Villarreal left them with back-to-back pre-season losses.
Arsenal, who started their preparations for the new season with victories over AC Milan and Newcastle United before losing to London rivals Tottenham Hotspur, found themselves trailing 2-0 inside 33 minutes against Spanish side Villarreal at the Emirates on Wednesday.
"Today I think the result is painful. I think they were super efficient but we've been naive, especially the way we have defended in open spaces and that's something that, especially the way we play, we have to absolutely nail," Arteta told reporters.
"Today we haven't been good at all in that department and that has cost us the game for sure."
Arteta, however, was pleased with what he saw from striker Viktor Gyokeres, who completed his 63.5 million euros ($74.14 million) switch from Sporting last month, after handing the 27-year-old Swede his first start in an Arsenal shirt.
"I think it was very important for him to start a match and start to have the feeling and the connection with the team," Arteta said.
"He's been with us only a week or so, but I really saw a lot of things and a lot of purpose, especially the way he was attacking certain spaces."
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Arteta also heaped praise on highly rated 15-year-old attacking midfielder Max Dowman, who won a penalty for Arsenal.
"He continues to impress, without a doubt. The impact he had in the game again today, the efficiency that he shows in every attack and action, it's incredible," the Spaniard added. REUTERS
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He professes an interest in Methodology, a Soviet-era school of philosophy in which society can be engineered, managed and transformed from above. In the tumult of modern Russian politics, that focus on power has translated for Mr Kiriyenko into shifting alliances and repeated reinvention. 'In a game without rules,' he once told an interviewer, 'the one who makes the rules wins.' Mr Kiriyenko was just 35 in 1998 when he briefly became Russia's prime minister. His youthful image and meteoric rise – he'd been a regional oil refinery manager a few years before – earned him the nickname Kinder Surprise, a play on the name of a European children's candy. After losing his post when Russia defaulted on its debt, Mr Kiriyenko cofounded a party pushing Western-style economic overhauls. 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In his new Kremlin job, Mr Kiriyenko was entrusted with orchestrating Mr Putin's version of democracy, an exercise in cementing the president's legitimacy and keeping control of a far-flung nation. As the first deputy chief of staff overseeing domestic politics, Mr Kiriyenko planned the selection of the Kremlin's preferred candidate for governor in each of Russia's more than 80 regions, the elections to fill the more than 600 seats in parliament, and the stage management of Mr Putin's own reelection in 2018 and in 2024. 'He's the technical implementer,' said Mr Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a liberal politician in Moscow who ran for president, with the Kremlin's approval, in 2018. 'It's a huge amount of work.' Mr Kiriyenko also held contests to identify the next generations of technocrats, featuring online aptitude tests and role-playing leadership games. Just in 2025, finalists of his 'Leaders of Russia' competition have been named to government roles such as auditing construction projects in occupied Ukraine, managing bus transit in suburban Moscow and running the health ministry in Khabarovsk in Russia's Far East. He has broadened his portfolio further by taking on Russia's last bastion of free speech: the internet. In 2021, Mr Kiriyenko wrested control of the country's most popular social network, VK, from an oligarch. Mr Kovalchuk put up much of the money. Mr Kiriyenko's son became CEO. Mr Kovalchuk's grandnephew took another senior role. The power of that alliance was on display in a blitz that many analysts saw as a prelude to a potential ban on WhatsApp. In March, VK unveiled its own messaging app. In June, Russia's communications minister praised the company for releasing a 'fully Russian messenger' in a televised meeting with Mr Putin. Days later, Russian lawmakers passed a bill mandating that a Russian-made messaging app should come preinstalled on all smartphones. In July, the government announced that this app would be the one developed by VK. 'For us, the government is always a partner and a senior comrade,' Mr Kiriyenko's son and the head of VK, Mr Vladimir S. Kiriyenko, said in April. Backing the invasion As Mr Putin massed troops and plotted his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the president's political aides were largely in the dark, Mr Kiriyenko's associates said. The three people close to the Kremlin said they were convinced that Mr Kiriyenko didn't share the fixation on Ukraine's pro-Western turn that drove Putin to attack the country. After the war started, Mr Kiriyenko soon refashioned himself once again. Trading his suit for olive-green shirts, he started traveling to occupied Ukraine amid the fighting, touring hospitals and schools. He worked on planning a public 'war crimes' trial of Ukrainians to show Mr Putin fulfilling his promise to 'denazify' the country, one of his associates told the Times in June 2022. The trial never materialised as Russian forces struggled on the battlefield, but Mr Kiriyenko said at a conference in 2023 that the war 'must end with trials of Ukrainian criminals'. He did succeed in putting on a different show – the sham referendums in which Moscow claimed Ukrainians under Russian occupation had voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia. Inside Russia, Mr Kiriyenko used the levers of his office to try to engineer popular support for Mr Putin's invasion. The Public Projects Directorate, a unit focused on patriotic initiatives that Mr Kiriyenko oversees, developed propaganda lessons for Russian schoolchildren. Students in a new school subject called 'Fundamentals of Security and Protection of the Motherland' learn first aid skills at a school in Kursk, Russia. PHOTO: NANNA HEITMANN/NYTIMES His staff also pressured midlevel officials to serve stints as administrators in occupied Ukraine, said Mr Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin analyst in Moscow who has worked with the Kremlin. 'Sure, those who don't want to can refuse,' Mr Markov said. 'But in that case they understand that they'll face serious limits on their careers.' Mr Kiriyenko's portfolio also includes the arts. He has ramped up government support for pro-war entertainers who backed the war while blackballing those critical of it, according to Russian media reports. Mr Iosif I. Prigozhin, a major music producer, said in an interview with the Times that the Kremlin gave 'a blank check' after the invasion to musicians who were 'more focused on national interests'. Mr Prigozhin's wife, the pop star Valeria, has performed at patriotic concerts in Red Square. He called Kiriyenko 'positive, decent, sensitive and precise'. When Mr Kiriyenko's office seeks performers for events, 'the approach is not demanding, but suggestive,' Mr Prigozhin said. Mr Kiriyenko's policies are also backed up by the full force of the Russian state. Thousands of anti-war Russians have been prosecuted or forced into exile in an effort that many analysts, opposition figures and the former colleagues of Mr Kiriyenko say they believe was largely coordinated by him as the Kremlin official who oversees domestic politics. Ilya V. Yashin, a Russian opposition leader, had just been arrested and interrogated in July 2022 when he said he chatted with a security service agent in the grim corridor of a law enforcement agency in Moscow while waiting for his prisoner transport to arrive. The agent told him that his arrest was a 'political decision', dropping hints about a 'Sergei' in the Kremlin who was a 'buddy' of Mr Boris Y. Nemtsov, the politician who brought Mr Kiriyenko into government in the 1990s. The suggestion was that Mr Kiriyenko was responsible for his fate, Yashin recalled in an interview after his release in a prisoner exchange in 2024, though he noted he couldn't be certain of Mr Kiriyenko's role, if any. To Yashin, the irony was remarkable. Both he and Mr Kiriyenko were allies, at different times, of Mr Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader assassinated in 2015. 'Now Nemtsov is dead, and one of his friends put another one in prison,' Yashin wrote from jail in 2022. 'Absolutely opportunistic' In February 2025, Russian state news outlets reported that Mr Kiriyenko was managing public unrest in Abkhazia, a Russian-backed breakaway region of Georgia. To help show the benefits of being on the Kremlin's side, Mr Kiriyenko offered a gift of 20 Russian school buses and organised a version of his trademark leadership competitions. Mr Kiriyenko's remit has been increasingly expanding outside Russia's borders. A different Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Mr Dmitry N. Kozak, oversaw relations with Abkhazia as recently as 2024. But Mr Kozak has lost influence in Moscow amid his criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, according to the three people close to the Kremlin, a US official and a Western contact. In the past few months, they said, Mr Kozak presented Mr Putin with a proposal to immediately stop the fighting in Ukraine, start peace negotiations and reduce the power of Russia's security services. The Russian president has kept Mr Kozak, who has been at Mr Putin's side since the 1990s, in his senior post. But he has shifted much of Mr Kozak's portfolio to Mr Kiriyenko, including managing Kremlin relations with Moldova and with the two breakaway regions of Georgia, the people said. The expansion of Mr Kiriyenko's influence shows how his star continues to rise at the Kremlin as he embraces and executes Putin's wartime policies. Mr Kiriyenko is 'effective' and 'absolutely opportunistic,' Yashin said. If Putin or a future Russian leader pivots back toward the West someday, Yashin said, 'Kiriyenko will find the words for it.' NYTIMES
