Petr Cech spoke to the media after Arsenal's dramatic win against Leicester City. Below is a transcription of what he said:
on the game…
I thought if Leicester got a point, their belief would be bigger. We closed the gap and we won a very important game and we depended on these sort of things some time ago and we are very close. You have to wait for them to lose three or four games but now it is a very small gap. Everybody has their difficult games to play.
on Welbeck…
I believed that we were going to score. Kasper made an unbelievable save against Giroud and I thought it was going to go in. We had many half chances or chances where you think: ‘okay, one last thing and we might score.’ It is a sweet moment for him because he has been working unbelievably hard to come back and he had a setback after the operation and he did the same thing all over again and today he got a sweet reward.
on the mood in the dressing room…
It is a big difference if you wait for your opponent to lose points, so now we are only two points off the top, so it is a good spot to be in. We have plenty of difficult games to play but we had to win the game and we managed to do it. Playing against 10 men is very tricky and time was going by and we kept missing chances but [we] kept our cool and composure and found a winner.
on the final few minutes…
We had to keep our concentration because we were becoming more and more dangerous by putting more and more numbers forward and we were searching for the winner. It became a bit tricky but what I like about our win was when they were down to 10 men, it is alway tricky to overcome the opponent coming down to 10 men, having the organisation and the players fighting for their lives. We managed to break them down and create chances. I like the fact that as time went by and we kept missing chances, we kept our composure and kept creating and coming and we had so many half chances in a spell where we could have scored more goals. There was one particular moment when Kasper, who was absolutely brilliant, [made a save] and if we had scored, we would have scored more.
on the title…
If you have a question of five or eight points then there is big difference. In the last few 48 minutes we turned an eight-point gap to a two-point one and that is a significant difference. They have been doing really [well], but I thought we did really well. We have been creating chances and apart from two or three counter-attacks we didn’t give them much, and we managed to find the win.
on Welbeck returning…
It is a sweet reward for him. He has been working really hard and he had a setback and then he had to have the operation. He had to start all over again and we could see in the last couple of weeks he looked really sharp and confident in training. He had a game for the under-21s which helped him get into the game and I thought today was fantastic for him. He really deserved his goal.
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