Theo Walcott scored his 19th goal of the season to help us beat West Ham United on Wednesday night.
After the match, the forward discussed the importance of the victory. Here’s what he said:
on a confidence boost…
I think you saw in patches of the Manchester City game that it was coming. We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves - we had to win our game, as simple as that. Going back to basics and getting a clean sheet [was good]. If we get clean sheets, we’ll win games, because we know we can score goals up top. We were patient today. West Ham frustrated us at times so we had to wait until we got that first goal. When it happened, you could see everyone relaxed a bit more and then the Arsenal true football came out.
on the most comfortable and confident win in a while…
The scoreline says it, [but] the first half was tough, West Ham did a good job and playing that long ball to Andy Carroll gave us a lot of problems. When he came off, maybe it played into our hands a bit more. West Ham are a strong team, they give anyone a good game but we’re just pleased we got a good result. We can forget about this now, move on. We’ve got a lot of busy games now, loads of games in this month, so well look forward to the next one on Monday night.
on what was said at half-time…
We always tend to leave that between ourselves. Players will speak to each other, the manager will get his message across and then it’s up to us to do a job. We did that. We listened to what the manager had to say. He’s taken a lot of grief recently and we’ve just been in the background doing what we do. We’re the players that go out there very week and try to perform. It’s been a tough run, I can’t lie, but hopefully the win can push us on.
on if this is a turning point…
We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves. We know that we should be doing better and we’ve just got to remember how good we are. That scoreline will show that we’re ready for a fight and that we’ll go all the way until it ends.
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