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Wenger on defeat, penalty and title race

Arsene Wenger spoke to the media after his side slipped to a 1-0 defeat at Stoke City on Saturday afternoon. 

Read a transcript of what he had to say below:

on a disappointing result...
I felt we had a good defensive performance and overall we are unlucky to lose this game. Offensively we didn't create enough and our offensive game was poor considering our standards. At the end of the day we didn't score because of that. We conceded a goal that was a nice gift from the referee but it can happen.

on the penalty incident…
He [Koscienly] is one yard away. How can he take his hand away? He has no time to take his hand away from the ball. There's is no intention at all but I feel we cannot influence the decision of the referee. I feel going forward we were not good enough to create chances and that's why we were punished.

on what the team lacked offensively…
You have to give Stoke credit, they defended well with resilience and made the game very physical. But we didn't cope well enough with it and we got punished.

on the referee…
Honestly I don't want to talk about the referee.

on Giroud being on the end of a lot of challenges…
I've nothing to say about that. I'm long enough in the game to make my own judgement and I prefer to concentrate on our own performance.

on the team's title chances…
It is not slightly worrying, it's a big worry for us to lose a game like that. It is a massive setback of course.

on Ozil not being fit enough to start…
No he was fit to start. He has played many many games. He came on at the right moment I think. But we just conceded a goal. When we started to pin them back on that long ball we were dominating. We had some dangerous situations even if we did't have any clear-cut chances but we conceded that penalty.

on the team bouncing back…
I'm not worried but in a game like that we didn't produce the performance that we wanted. To win a title is when you are expected to perform you have to perform it's as simple as that.

on the team being fragile today…
We were not fragile at all. I think our defensive performance was outstanding. If you look well at the chances that Stoke had today I can see maybe one cross on Crouch and after that what did they create? Nothing at all, so you cannot say that our defenders didn't perform.

on how he assesses the team's title chances…
I don't assess them at all because I think what he have to focus on is our performance and play well in the next game.

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