When he made a plea for understanding and for time as the crisis around him deepened last week, besieged Chelsea manager Graham Potter chose one man as an example of the good things that can happen at a football club if only the board holds its nerve and keeps the faith. He chose Mikel Arteta.
Arteta has become a beacon of hope for the ridiculed and the pilloried, the bedraggled and the bewildered. When things seem beyond rescue, when it feels as if you are being dragged inexorably towards a whirlpool of swirling mediocrity, when the fans want you out, when it looks as if you have failed, there is always the knowledge of what Arteta did.