Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain spoke to the media after Arsenal's 3-3 draw with Anderlecht on Tuesday night. This is what he had to say:
on the mood in the dressing room…
Obviously we are very disappointed with the way it finished. To be 3-0 up at home and with the way we were playing, we felt we had the game under control. You should be able to see the game out at this level, so we are very disappointed that we weren’t able to do that.
on what the issue was…
It is hard to say. The goals were disappointing that we conceded, they were goals that we would liked to have been able to stop at source. They were simple goals, we need to stop crosses. We failed to do that and to be fair they managed to put some good balls in and get on the end of them. It is hard to put our finger on what went wrong, maybe a bit of complacency there. When you are 3-0 up you can’t afford to have any complacency at this level because you get punished. We were at Anderlecht a couple of weeks ago in a similar position to what they are now so we should know better than anyone that the game is not over until the final whistle.
on qualifying for the knockout stages…
Obviously this is a setback and we would have loved to have been able to qualify here, that was the only mission that we were on. But we do realise that we only need a point from the last two matches - it is not going to be easy to get but I have faith in the team. But this is a hard lesson that we can’t be complacent and we have to go into those games with full focus for the 90 minutes and get the job done.
on how important the Dortmund game now is…
It’s going to be very important. We know we need to get points on the table to qualify. We would’ve loved to have done it tonight and that was the aim but we failed to do that which is really disappointing. We need to pick ourselves up so it’s a lesson learned and so that we make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again. We need to make sure we see the Dortmund game in a positive attitude and approach the game in the right way.
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
