It was a poor night on Thursday as we were beaten by Ostersunds - but the bottom line is that we have qualified for the last-16 of the Europa League.
Jack Wilshere was as disappointed as anyone with the display, and this is what he told the media afterwards:
on whether Ostersunds deserved the win…
Yes, I think so. Especially in the first half. We were nowhere near good enough. We improved a little bit in the second half but it still wasn’t good enough. We’re through and as you said, that’s all that counts. We’ll see who we get tomorrow and then we’ve got a big game on Sunday so we’ve got to refocus now on that.
on why it was difficult and whether players switched off…
Maybe. When you are 3-0 up in a two-legged game, you still have to go again. We know it’s only half-time, we know what quality they want to play with and maybe we underestimated them a little bit. But the main thing is, we’re through. We weren’t good enough though. We’ll accept that and move on.
on the coming weeks and big games ahead…
We’re through, so that’s probably the only positive. We did show better character in the second half. We came out and we had a little bit of a go, but it wasn’t good enough. You can’t start a game like that and expect to compete at this level, even against Ostersunds, they’ve got a lot of quality and they deserve to be in this tournament as much as we do. We know that and we have to take that into the next game when we see who we get. If it’s a lesser team then we have to focus more.
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.