Wenger - We must be ready to pounce

Arsene Wenger says his side must take advantage of any weakness shown by the teams ahead of them in the table.

The Gunners have taken 10 points from a possible 12 over the festive period and head into their New Year’s Day clash at Southampton in positive mood.

Wenger is pleased with his side’s form but has emphasised the need for consistency during the second half of the season.

“We will fight to be as close as possible [to the top],” he said. “We are not in a mode of calculating, we are in a mode of 'let’s go to the next game and win it'.

“You give your best and if there is a weakness in front of you, you want to take advantage of it. I don’t know if there will be any weakness in front of us, but what I know is that we can give our best until the end of the season to have a chance to do it.

“I believe that there is a deficit between the potential we have shown and the number of points we have. That’s what we want to get right. I feel we were very, very unlucky with the injuries we got. With the number of injuries we’ve had, we have survived quite well.

“But I believe that hopefully in the second part of the season, we’ll have more stability, especially defensively, to be more consistent.”

Wenger is proud of the way his side have progressed over the past 12 months, and hopes for even greater success in 2015.

“Overall it [has been] a positive year, because we made 79 points last season and won the FA Cup,” he said. “In the Champions League, we went out against Bayern unfortunately. But overall I think it was a positive year.

“This season, we’ll see where we get. But I think we are some points short of what we could have achieved. It’s time to catch back the points that we lost now until the end of the season.

“I feel it is nearly impossible that we will have the same bad luck on the injury front that we had in 2014. What is explainable in 2014 is that we had many players injured because they played in the World Cup.”