Mikel Arteta clarifies Arsenal’s response to the Everton loss and title setback.
James Tarkowski’s goal separated the two teams as Sean Dyche provided relegation-threatened Everton a much-needed boost, resulting in Arsenal’s second loss of the season.
Mikel Arteta lamented as he left his former stomping grounds at Goodison Park that his Arsenal team failed to deliver what they had been promising all season.
But the bullish boss is confident that his young team is not experiencing a confidence issue despite feeling the full weight of a title battle with Manchester City breathing down their necks.
He believes it was a warning about a speed bump on the path to glory. After Everton exposed the Gunners by producing more opportunities from open play and controlling the emotional mood of the game, he stated, “This is a difficult and challenging journey, and there will be large obstacles in the middle that we must conquer.”
When asked if he believed the pressure affected him, he responded curtly. “I don’t believe so, we’ve already played a number of games like this this season. Here, though, we had no influence over the intensity level of the crowd.”
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Arteta was cool and confident that his players would learn from a game in which they were dragged into a completely different style of play by the atmosphere and Everton’s morale. This may have been an indication of Arteta’s maturing serenity as a young manager.
“We’re going to stay together. The best way to react is to understand who we are and how we got into this position. We struggled to control their direct type of game, and get back to the game we want to play.
“Do those things right, manage the game better, do it better individually and collectively and we earn the right to win games. That is what we will do.”
If it is any consolation to Arsenal and their supporters, Everton goalscoring hero James Tarkowski insisted this is a very different Gunners, and it wasn’t simply a story of their collapse against a certain type of football.
“I think this is a different Arsenal from the one I’ve played against for the last few years. These are the best team in the league at the minute, they’ve been flying but today was about us. We had to earn it, and we did.”
