Arsenal 0-1 Swansea City
Coach Wenger reacts:
on the defeat…
We were unlucky I think against a team who refused to play completely and just defended. It was a question of being patient enough and if we couldn’t win it not to lose it. Overall I was encouraged by the quality that we showed in the second half, but it’s frustrating. When you cannot win a game, don’t lose it. We knew exactly what could happen. It was not even a break. We were warned of the kind of goal they could score with Montero kicking the ball in the air and we were short in jumping for the ball. For the rest we rushed our finishing because we had plenty of chances in the second half. It was just a question of scoring a goal.
on whether Ospina could have stopped the goal…
I don’t know because I have to see it again. Did the defender not jump or was it that he could have come out? We knew that those kind of crosses are crosses that are easy to defend.
on the Manchester United game being crucial now…
We still have a game in hand. What is crucial is to respond on Sunday and show that it was an accident today. That is the most important thing.
on missing chances…
We’ve scored plenty of goals until recently. In the last two home games we didn’t score and that was frustrating because when you have so much of the ball and play with such accuracy around the box. They defended well. They came just to defend with four defenders and six midfielders, and they defended. That’s it. If you win, you’re fantastic but if you lose people say to you, ‘why did you not play?’. They won so they are fantastic.
on the players getting nervous…
I believe you have to deal with that on the pitch and that’s where the players can’t get caught by the anxiety of the crowd. I can understand that the crowd was anxious but on the pitch when the players had the ball that shouldn’t interfere with your finishing.
we showed a lot of quality but were not very good in our finishing and guilty of giving away a mistake. At the moment we cannot afford that. When you are a defender you cannot give a goal away the way we did with five minutes to go. It’s impossible.
“It is [disappointing] but we should get encouragement. If we have done it for 10 games, we can do it again. We haven’t lost our quality here, so let’s restart on Sunday.
“Of course it makes that game important because the way you respond to a defeat always gives you a big [indication that] the team is strong mentally and that is what is expected of us on Sunday.”
arsenal.com
