After enduting a rollercoaster of emotions in the final few minutes of our 2-1 win against Wolves, Mikel Arteta took his seat in the Emirates Stadium press conference room for psot-match media duties.
He was asked about lessons learned tonight, the heart of the squad, injuries and much more.
Here is everything he had to say:
on the mood in the dressing room:
It was a relief, but a very clear understanding that the margin should have been bigger. After not being precise enough in the first half with the amount of situations that we generated inside the opposition box and we didn’t pick the right colour of shirt on so many occasions, we had an overload to do that. We had to improve in the second half in relation to that, I think we did it. We generated more chances, scored a goal, but after we had a period of two or three minutes in deep, totally passive, with horrible defensive habits, that is nowhere near the level that is required against a team that hasn’t had a single shot. The first time that they had the opportunity to do it, they scored the goal and this is the Premier League. Unfortunately, we are relieved because we managed to score a goal at the end and go and win it, but we need to improve in that sense for sure.
on the grit and determination we showed:
That’s something very positive, but I don’t put it down sometimes to, yeah, resilience and goal. No, it’s what happened before. We should have stopped the source before and that’s on us. You have to give credit to Wolves and what they’ve done. I watched a game when they played Stamford Bridge, when they played against Villa and how unlucky they were not to get a result. I knew that wasn’t going to be an easy game at all, but we made it even harder with what we did in the manner that we conceded the goal and that’s unacceptable.
on what we’ll get up to this week:
What we have to do now is reset, give them two days that they can decompress a little bit and then we have a long week that we can prepare. When we don’t train, there are things that slowly deteriorate and certain habits start to deteriorate because you don’t train them and use that opportunity to do so, give it will everybody a boost because we know that the Christmas period is often seen as season-defining and we want to be on top of it.
on what we learned from today:
Learn from it and then move on, and every time you win in the Premier League, you should be happy. You should be conscious of the difficulty of it, but we made it even harder for ourselves today and that’s the big lesson that we have to do. When the opponent merits something, that’s fine and they did a lot of things to make it difficult for us, but that’s one of the things that, I don’t know, we should make sure that we improve them.
on how we can avoid defending deeper:
No, it’s deeper and then we have the ball in the hands of the keeper and we don’t play, we just kick it. This is on us and we have to continue to play in the manner that we have to play. We can manage the result in a certain way, but it has to be on ourselves. We can defend it because they commit a lot of players and there’s a moment that you cannot press them, that’s fine, but the level of activity in that block has to be very different to the one that we had.
on Ben White’s injury:
Exactly that, obviously he hasn’t played a lot of minutes because of the previous knee issue that he had, then the moment he started to get some momentum he had to play a lot because we didn’t have any other solution. We had to even risk Wilo today because probably it wasn’t their best call to play 90 minutes because we were buying tickets for another injury, but we don’t have anybody else, but yeah that’s bad news for sure.
on what the issue is for White:
It looks like a hamstring [injury], so we don’t know the extent of that, but probably tomorrow or the day after we’ll know more.
on not having a shot on target in the first half:
Because we didn’t pick out the right colour of the shirt. When you have a free metre, normally we put the ball not on target and go, and we put it out and time and time and time again, it is frustrating, yeah, but this is the game, but I expect to hit the right colour. You have to hit the back post every single time at this level, and today we haven’t done it, so we started to make things more difficult for us.
on if there was complacency inside the stadium:
I don’t know, before Brentford I called everybody at 7.30 and today was a late kick-off, I forgot to say that, but at the end we have to completely do the game if we want to get that as well, so there’s nothing to question our supporters, it has to come from us. In the last minute, everybody was cheering and jumping up in their seats, that’s normal and understandable. Hopefully we can do it from the first minute.
on the way we played in the final few minutes:
Full gas has to be from the 1 to the 96th [minute]. There were moments that we tried without being very, very efficient and probably not as clinical as we should be in defining moments, and I don’t think it’s on purpose but there were moments in the second half after scoring the goal, but that’s not what we want, that’s for certain and we have to improve.
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