#PLStories- Mikel Arteta on Thomas Partey’s injury, Tierney’s absence, Tavares sub after Crystal Palace loss #ARSENALFC
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Mikel Arteta Arsenal
That was a pretty poor night all round wasn’t it
Yes especially in the first half. Congratulations first of all to Crystal Palace for winning the match and the way 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. When we did a little bit we were sloppy on the ball and we didn’t have any dominance, any sequences of play where we could take some control of the game and we conceded two poor goals. Overall it’s unacceptable, we put our hands up, apologise, regroup. Tomorrow is a new day and a new opportunity to prepare the group against Brighton.
Did you see that coming today?
No. I could not see it. We discussed it just before kick off, the way you win here is when you compete the way you should. That means you win duels, have presence and the composure on the pitch to manage certain situations. They are a really physical team and the pitch is not the best to do that so you have to find a way to do other things that usually you don’t have to do. We didn’t manage to do that.
Can you put it down to pressure?
No because the pressure has been there the last seven or eight weeks. We are talking all the time about the race for the top four and these have been putting in really good performances and getting really good results. Today we didn’t perform it’s as simple as that. We were second best in every department especially in the first half. When we tried to change in the second half and play much more the way we wanted to play, in defining moments we had three or four big chances and we didn’t score the goals that we needed to come back in the game.
Is the lack of options in the squad a concern?
It’s what we have. We lost Kieran, we lost Thomas now and that’s it. With the players that we have we will try like we’ve been trying since the start of the season. We’ve never had a big squad. We can’t find any excuses and we have to look at ourselves and again myself, I repeat because it wasn’t good enough.
What’s the latest on Kieran Tierney’s injury?
He’s seeing a specialist tomorrow and we will know more the extent of the injury. The feeling that he had wasn’t positive and what the scans showed either. But we have to wait and see what happens.
Odegaard missed a chance and then gave away a penalty. Is that an example of the mental toughness your players need to have?
Today there’s too many things that went wrong in the same time. These are two examples, but Emile had a clear chance before that to put it 2-1, Bukayo had another one and then Eddie hit the post. Overall the performance didn’t deserve the win or to get anything out of the game we have to be honest with ourselves.
Because they’re young players is that something they need to learn?
But these young players have been doing really well. I don’t like to be unfair. When they do something it’s because they’re young, but when they’ve been playing extremely well, performing under pressure and doing what we asked them to do. Today we didn’t do it.
Nuno Tavares came off early again today. Why did you make that change and do you worry about how that might affect his confidence?
Today it was just a tactical reason. How I wanted to do it with what Palace were doing there and how we could attack and control the game much better in that position, put another attacking midfielder with Emile in that position. I’m sorry that it was Nuno again but we had to do it.
How bad does Partey’s injury look?
I don’t know but he felt something in the same area that he got injured previously so that’s a big concern.
Spurs stay above you in the table. Does that psychologically mean anything to you at this stage?
No. we have a game in hand still and we need to play. We know in the nine games a lot of things will happen. We have to play each other, we have to play some big games coming up, we have to focus in ourselves. The problem we had today was not Spurs it was what we did in the first half.
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