Of course Arsene Wenger was happy that his Arsenal team took all three points from the Premier League home clash with Brighton and Hove Albion, because it sends him, the players and especially the Arsenal fans, into the two week break for the latest international fixtures in a good frame of mind.
There is certainly more optimism around the club than there was at the last international break, when we had just been humbled by Liverpool and were languishing down towards the bottom of the league table. Since then Arsenal have won every game except one and that draw away to Chelsea was still a good result and an impressive performance which nearly earned us a win.
Along with progression to the next stage of the League Cup and top spot in our Europa League group, Arsenal have transformed our league position from neat the bottom to being right on the coat tails of the pace setters, so you would expect the boss to be over the moon right? Wrong and I am very glad about it too.
The fact that Wenger chose to look at the negative aspects from our most recent win, as reported by Metro, tells me that he wants more from his players. Too many times in the past it has appeared that we are content to be doing okay and that is not the way to win a title. But with the Frenchman demanding more from his team, this time focusing on the fact we should have scored more than two goals against Brighton, he is creating a culture in which nothing but the best will do.
Wenger said, ‘I believe we got a clean sheet, we got the three points and offensively we were a bit in doubt.
‘The fluency was sometimes there, sometimes not.
‘We maybe sometimes eased off a little bit too quickly and thought “ok maybe we will just win this”.
‘That’s a little bit the negative of the day.
‘Maybe we didn’t play a high enough pace to score more goals. They defended well as well, they intercepted many dangerous balls around the box.
‘In the end we knew we had a very testing week. We had two home games and one very long trip for the Europa League, we won the three games and that’s very positive.’
How much better is it to hear the boss wanting more than to hear him talk positively about Arsenal when the rest of us can see we are not quite there?
Bob.