Last night’s North London Derby was a great display of football by both sides, but yet again Arsenal failed to take our chances. We were once again playing with Xhaka at full-back alongside Sokratis, with Monreal and Maitland-Niles on the flanks, but according to the boss Unai Emery it was not our makeshift defence that lost us the game it was the forwards’ failure to take their chances.
Emery told Arsenal.com after the game: “Good evening. I think we worked like we wanted to, like we’d prepared for this match. We created chances in the first half to score, but today the efficiency was not good for us. We didn’t concede a lot of chances, but they have good players with quality who scored. We worked for 90 minutes and in our moments we didn’t take our chances. They scored theirs. Only the first half, I think we were good on the pitch but then sometimes we needed a bit more of the ball to keep possession longer. But that’s not easy against them because they press really well. Our planned game, we worked on that. It was poor finishing.”
Then he was asked if our poor finishing or tiredness cost us? “The first one.” he relied. “We had Micki with the one on one [chance early on] and they scored with their first one-on-one. but this is football. Today I am happy with our performance, but not happy with our result. But also I think we are doing our process. They are ahead of us in this process. We need to continue creating our identity, our strong ideas to be more consistent in the games. But this is our way. Now we’ve finished in this competition and are thinking about Saturday because we have another three very important competitions, the first is the Premier League, then the Europa League and also the FA Cup. Today we finished this competition.”
So one trophy down and three to go. Considering that Tottenham and Chelsea now have to play a two-legged semi-final in January on top of all their other commitments. It may be good to have a chance to go to Wembley, but it will hopefully tire them out for their League games….