It is worth mentioning that Southampton could have briefly gone to the top of the Premier League last night if they had beaten Arsenal, so we were expecting another tough game at the Emirates.
So when the ex-Gunner Theo Walcott put the visitors in front, we expected heads to drop, and pondered the fact that we hadn’t scored an open-play goal in over 12 hours, but the lads didn’t give up and in fact seemed to raise their game in search of the equaliser.
Just 7 minutes after the break, Aubameyang finally got his name on the scoresheet and it looked like we were back in the game, until, as usual, disaster struck when Gabriel was given his marching orders after two quick yellow cards.
But despite our usual setback, Arteta was pleased that we held on to a point, only our second in 6 League games. The boss told Arsenal.com: “Considering the fact that we played 35 minutes with 10 men, we have to take the point because we showed some resilience and character to hang in there for so long against a really dangerous team.
“But at the same time we’re disappointed because we came back after conceding the goal, we showed how much we wanted it, created some situations and at half-time we corrected a few things. We came back really strong in the game, scored a goal and then when we had the best moments, we shot ourselves in the foot. It obviously made it really hard.
“It’s very difficult to compete in this league when you play for such a long period with 10 men. When you’re struggling for the results, it makes it even more complicated but I think that the boys stood up for it and again showed a lot of character and resilience. They never gave up. After 1-0 I was worried because after this moment, you can start to see players hiding but they did the complete opposite.”
So Arteta is still seeing the pòsitives in our play depite the lack of points to show for it. Let us hope that some confidence has returned to the side and we can start pulling away from the relegation zone very quickly…