Arsenal fans can’t deny that we had reservations about our chances of progressing in the League Cup after we saw Mikel Arteta’s confirmed team last night. Obviously the most important thing is to win at Wolves on Saturday to make sure we stay top of the League during the World Cup break, but it would have been good to go into it still in every competition.
But Arteta clearly thinks that Arsenal should have put the game to bed after going 1-0 up, and he thinks our backup players did their best, except for putting the ball in the net. The boss told Arsenal.com: “The view is that the result doesn’t reflect actually what happened on the pitch. I think it’s clear, but there are two things on the pitch: those are the boxes. They were much more efficient than us and that makes the whole difference, because in the moment that we were clearly on top of the game when we had the chances to get away with the game, we conceded the goal and that changed the game.
“Losing is [disappointing], but the way the boys tried and played, and the amount of changes that we had to make because of the congestion and we have to protect the players and give them chances. I’m really happy with that, but obviously, we wanted to continue in the competition and unfortunately, we are out.”
The start of Arsenal’s problems came about when Danny Welbeck was 1 on 1 with our young keeper Karl Hein, who slipped over and ended up giving a penalty away, but Arteta doesn’t regret giving the rookie his place in the team. ” I think he deserved the chance. He’s the first goalkeeper of the national team at his age and I think that’s something that is not usual. He totally deserves his chance and if I had to play tomorrow again, I would play him again because you only get experience when you’ve played football matches. Karl has that and errors are part of football.”
Oh well, I guess our reserves had to lose at some time, and at least it was only the League Cup. The only regret is that the backup players now can’t get some extra games after our long break…
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