Mikel Arteta Arsenal
You must be bitterly disappointed with that?
Really disappointed. Normally I sit here, I can defend what we’ve done. Today it’s not easy. Newcastle were 100 times better than us in every department from the beginning to the end and it is very hard to accept it.
What do you put that down to?
We knew but we didn’t cope with it, we didn’t compete, we never got into the game. We put ourselves in trouble time after time. We lost every duel. In every aspect of the game we were second best and Newcastle totally deserved to win the match, probably by a bigger margin.
Do you need a miracle now to reach Champions League
We need to win and we need a defeat for them. We know that in football anything is possible. You have to be there. Today we have to swallow all the poison that we can and tomorrow start again.
Are the players devastated in the dressing room now?
Now it is too late.
It was another game where your team went behind but couldn’t come back. What do you put that down to?
We need to find other ways to do it, especially when we find ourselves in this situation. The amount of changes we have made because of injuries, with Gabby who was feeling something and with Tomiyasu. We tried to change it but again, we were extremely poor in all departments that can give you a chance at least to compete in a match and today we weren’t good enough.
This is twice where you’ve fallen at the penultimate hurdle after the semi final at Villarreal last season.
There are a lot of similarities to that. We have six or seven players out and at the time Aubameyang had the header and it hits the post. Then it’s personality or not personality. The situation is that it was a very different game against Spurs with what happened. Today we were nowhere near the level we need to be at to play in the Champions League.
Do you feel let down by your players tonight?
No I am the maximum responsible all the time. If there’s someone who has created an expectation this year that no one at the start of the season would talk about, it is those players and I will always defend them. But tonight, that’s really, really difficult to do.
How bad is Tomiyasu’s injury?
We don’t know we have to assess him, but he felt a muscular issue and we test him.
How do you pick the players up for Sunday?
We have to swallow everything digest it and tomorrow is another day. We still have five days to prepare that match and we know we have to do.
When you see what Newcastle did in January do you have any regrets over what you did then?
We have done what we can and what we are allowed to do and what we could do with the resources that we had. In the start of the season the team we were able to build is the team that we were able to build and it is the same team that has taken us all the way here.
