West Hem fans must feel like they had found a late Christmas present last night as they watched Arsenal squander chance after chance after chance, and the referee provided them with another couple of gifts to make their day.
It has been mentioned quite a lot lately how we are missing a clinical finisher this season, and it’s no surprise when you consider the amount of chances created in our opponents box that have ended up with zero result in the end.
It’s no wonder that Mikel Arteta seemed confused by the fact that we lost the game as he rues our multitude of missed opportunities. When asked what he would like to say after that performace, he replied: “Congratulate West Ham and praise my players, that’s what I can say.
“This is football. You look what we’ve done in the game, how much we generated in the game and to see the result is very disappointing, but they were better than us in both boxes. They had two shots, with the penalty, three, we had thirty. I don’t know how many touches in the box, how many situations, how many open goals to score and we haven’t. In football you have to do that better if you want to win, and today we haven’t won because of that, and for the rest, the team kept trying and had an incredible attitude again.”
He was then asked what he thought of Arsenal’s myriad missed chances, and what could be done about it. “It’s what it is,” he said. “we have to try to generate. If we don’t score goals in thirty shots, we have to do fifty or sixty to try to score, it’s the only thing. I cannot imagine a game that you have more dominance, more touches in the box, less situations of the opponents against a really good West Ham side, but today wasn’t enough to win the game.”
When you look at the stats from the game that were totally dominated by the Gunners, including having an incredible 77 touches in West Ham’s box but still not putting the ball in the net and 74% of the possession over the 90 minutes, it seems unlikely that we ended up losing, but Arteta was philosophical about the situation: “It is, but this is football, when the team generates that much normally you are going to win games and that’s the way we have done it, because as well against Brighton we generate so much, against Liverpool as well. But we score goals in different ways and we have to make another step in that area to win the game more comfortably for sure, because today the team deserves to win the game, there’s no question about that.”
There may be no questions, but instead I think Arteta should be looking to see if he can find the answers. A more clinical striker could possibly help, don’t you think?
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