Arsenal Arteta Disappointed After Arsenal Loss To Crystal Palace

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has expressed disappointment over his team performance against Crystal Palace in Monday’s Premier League game.

The Gunners failed to climb to top four following a 3-0 loss to the Eagles at the Selhurst Park.

Arteta who won the manager of the month award failed to guide Arsenal against a more determined Crystal Palace side.

Read Also:Liverpool beat Arsenal to close gap with PL leaders Manchester City

Speaking in his post-match interview, the Spaniard congratulated Crystal Palace for the win and admitted they were not in their best of form especially in the first half.

He said: “Yes, especially in the first half, but first of all, congratulations to Crystal Palace for winning the match and the way that they performed, but we weren’t at the races today, especially in the first half.

We were late to every ball, we were soft in the duels and we didn’t earn the right to play, and when we did a little bit we were sloppy on the ball.

We didn’t have any dominance or sequences of play when we could take control of the game and we conceded two poor goals as well, so overall it’s unacceptable.

“We need to put our hands up, apologies, regroup, and tomorrow is a new day and a new opportunity to prepare for the game against Brighton.

On if he saw the performance by Palace coming he admitted he never saw it coming.

No, I could not see it. We discussed it just before the kick-off, the way you win here is when you compete in the way that you should, and competing means winning duels and having composure on the pitch to manage the situations.

They are a really physical team and the pitch is not at the best to do that, so you have to find ways to do other things that usually you don’t have to do, and we didn’t manage to do that.”

With the loss, the Gunners are now on pressure to make it to the top four but Arteta put that worry behind him.

“No because the pressure has been there for the last seven or eight weeks.

“We are talking all the time about the race for the top four and the boys have been performing extremely well and getting the results and playing really well.

Today we didn’t perform and it’s as simple as that, we were second best in every department, especially in the first half, and when we tried to change in the second half, we did and we played much more of the game that we wanted to play.

“In the final moments we had three of four big chances that we didn’t score to get back and give ourselves a chance to get back in the game.

“We’ve got a game in hand still and we need to play.

We know that with nine games a lot of things are going to happen, we have to play each other and we have to play some big games coming up.

“We have to focus on ourselves and the problem that we had today is not Spurs, it was us and what we did in the first half.”

Arsenal will be hoping to bounce back to winning ways when they host Brighton and Hove Albion this weekend.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *