Mikel Arteta claims that Leicester City’s set up in their Premier League game against his team in their last match shows that they are getting respected.
The Gunners were beaten 1-0 by the Foxes in a closely contested game, but one thing that was obvious in the match was Leicester’s strategy.
The Foxes are known for playing free-flowing attacking football, but in that game, they were very compact and maintained their shape for the duration.
You can tell that their game plan was to deny Arsenal the chance to express themselves before hitting the Gunners on the counter-attack.
It worked for them as the returning Jamie Vardy scored the only goal of the match.
Arteta is now claiming that Brendan Rodgers plan for the game shows that what they are doing at the Emirates is being respected and claimed that more teams will do that so his side has to prepare.
“We’ve improved on a lot of things in my opinion and we have all the stats to show that,” he said via BT Sports.
“Our thinking after Leicester, the reason why they did what they did in their game plan, to sit so low against us when they are not normally a team that do that – they’ve been really dominant and play really attractive football – I came to the conclusion that we have the respect from other teams for them to do that.
“Now we have to try to change our strategy a little bit and try to train against more certain blocks that I think are going to happen a bit more often.
“We have made teams think, ‘If we do that, we’ll be in trouble so we have to try to do something else’.
“We’re going to work on that and the moment we improve that, we’ll become even better.”
