If, as the saying goes, living well is the best revenge, then Unai Emery is certainly getting his own back on those he will always believe opened the trapdoor beneath him far too soon at Arsenal.
While his old club languish in the Premier League, his new team Villarreal set a new club record on Tuesday night and are in the Champions League places in LaLiga.
Villarreal should probably have beaten Athletic Bilbao. As it was their draw extended their unbeaten run to 19 games – the best in the club’s history – and it kept them above Barcelona in the top four.
Emery did his best to stay calm when he gave an interview to Sportsmail back in May, but there were times when his frustration got the better of him.
‘No one inside the club knew how to protect me. They would say: “Yeah, Unai, we’re with you” but to the fans and the dressing room, they weren’t able to do it,’ he said as he explained how he believed he’d been hung out to dry at the first sign that his reign was not going to be just one long succession of improvements.
He says his difficulties in mastering English was used as a stick to beat him with. ‘It’s like when I said “good ebening”, okay it should be “good evening”, I needed to practice my accent so that it was more “good evening” than “good ebening”.