Following our first defeat of the season at the hands of Manchester United, Mikel Arteta felt that on another day, his side could have continued their winning start to the campaign.
A debut goal from Antony and a Marcus Rashford brace saw the hosts claim a 3-1 victory, with Bukayo Saka equalising on the hour mark before some clinical finishing saw Eric Ten Hag's over the line.
Arteta gave his views to the gathered media in his post-match press conference - here's everything he said:
on the result…
Well, I’m very disappointed that we haven’t won the game because the game was there for the taking. We haven’t won it because we lacked some discipline in certain moments to defend certain actions, and then we were involved in something in front of the opponent’s goal.
on the VAR decision to rule out Martinelli’s goal…
I haven’t seen the action, but what I said is that it was a soft foul, so it’s just the consistency of the soft foul on Bukayo Saka from [Tyrone] Mings on the penalty last week, but it’s not a penalty. The soft foul on Aaron Ramsdale when we conceded against Villa is a goal, so it’s just consistency and there’s nothing we can do now because it’s too late just to be consistent.
on whether we were naive in the goals we conceded…
We lacked discipline and we conceded the first goal when it was an action with Bruno and three vs three in the backline and we don’t follow our principles and we concede the goal, which was two against one. After that it was all us, chance after chance, dominating the game and imposing ourselves in the way that we want to play. I said at half-time to the boys: ‘the game is there for the taking'.
We play with even more courage and we’re going to win the game.’ We went to 1-1 and we should have been 2-1 or 3-1, and in the best moment again we gave them all away in a dangerous area and on top of that we stepped in when we can never do that again.
We suffered the goal and it’s a big lesson. If you want to win here you have to do everything so right and especially if you don’t do it there, then in the opponent’s goal with the amount of chances that we created we needed to score more goals.
on whether he noticed anything different about this United team…
I’m not here to evaluate United. What I saw is a very different Arsenal team that came here and played the way that we wanted to play against these world-class players and unfortunately we didn’t get the result that we deserved.
on whether we still have a lot to learn…
We need to be consistent with the top teams and to challenge at the top of this league, really you have to come here and play the way that you play, but also win and that’s a very different story. But to play the way that we did here today I want to see how many teams will do it this season.
on how he will stop this result harming the team’s confidence…
It won’t happen. That won’t happen because the performance is there, and we know what we lacked today. The details to lose the game are here and you have a very different performance with the same result is how I want to take it because then you are questioning your level, and I don’t think there is any question of the level there.
on how difficult it is to maintain consistency when players are injured...
You are going to hurt me about that and I’m not going to put any excuses because these are the players that we have, and for me they’re the best players. We try to do that and give them confidence and belief, and with those players we play here the way that we played, so that’s it and that’s not going to change.
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