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'We need the fans more than ever now'

Thomas Vermaelen

Thomas Vermaelen has called for Arsenal's players and fans to stick together as they digest a difficult week for the Club.

Blackburn Rovers inflicted a surprise FA Cup defeat on Arsene Wenger's side on Saturday and Bayern Munich compounded Arsenal's woes with an impressive 3-1 win at Emirates Stadium on Tuesday.

Vermaelen knows that Arsenal must produce their best performance of the season to stand a chance of qualifying for the quarter-finals of the Champions League, but he won't be giving up - and he hopes the fans won't either.

"We need the fans because they belong to the Club," said the captain. "We have to stand behind each other. That’s the only thing we can do.

"Of course I can see why they are frustrated. Sometimes you’re frustrated as a player as well. If you lose, you get frustrated. You have to stick together, and work hard. We need each other.

"We hurt as players as well. We don’t want to lose. We try our best and work hard to get results"

Thomas Vermaelen

"We’ve done it before. Sometimes we had a disappointment and we came back really strongly. I’m not worried about that. We have to analyse what we can do better at this level and work on that and go to the next game.

"At the moment of course there’s a lot of disappointment. I think we didn’t play disciplined enough as a team to win [on Tuesday], especially in the first half. But I don’t think we come out of the dressing room and think that we’re going to start slowly. We do our best.

"We’re not happy and are disappointed but we have to look at ourselves and stick together in difficult times. That’s the first thing we have to do - don’t blame each other or look at each other, just stay as a team and work hard every day to get the results back.

"We hurt as players as well. We don’t want to lose. We try our best and work hard to get results. We’re professionals. We want to win games. That’s why we’re playing at this level. It hurts us [to] lose games."

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