After seeing his team dominate proceedings against Aston Villa, Mikel Arteta was left scratching his head as to how we left Birmingham tasting defeat.
John McGinn’s sixth-minute strike ultimately proved to be the difference between the teams as Unai Emery’s side clinched a 15th straight home win, but that didn’t tell the whole story as we missed several chances and had the ball in the net twice, but saw them chalked off twice.
And Mikel, who watched the game from the stands as he undertook his touchline ban, was left frustrated that his team didn’t get what they deserved having put an in-form Villa team under mountains of pressure throughout.
“I’m very disappointed with the result,” the boss said post-match. “When you perform the way we did today against this team, I haven’t seen a team do what we did to Villa today but we still lost it.
“We weren’t involved enough in the opponent's box, and we had to defend one or two times in our box and that was one of the reasons why. We had some real open situations to put the ball in the back of the net or to make a pass where the goal was completely open but we didn’t find it.”
This was our fourth game in 11 days, and with a trip to PSV Eindhoven followed by a home game against Brighton & Hove Albion next week, the boss was quick to tell his team that they have to get over just our second defeat of the season quickly.
“I just said to the boys put your head up,” he added. "There’s a lot of things that we’ve done really, really well today, but this is defined in the boxes and today we didn’t have the accuracy that is required at this level to win the game.
“As I’ve said, I haven’t seen a team do that yet here and we’ve done that today but we have to come away with something much more than what we are doing.”
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