The aftermath of last night’s defeat will be felt for a very long time, especially if we don’t bounce back and beat Chelsea on Saturday. Arsene Wenger was just left frustrated after his team’s dire first 45 minutes, but he was happy to deflect the fault from his team and take the blame on the chin. “I’m responsible for the results of the team.” Le Prof said after the game. “I’m frustrated that we did not win. What the other teams do doesn’t matter. What you want is to win the games and I’m very frustrated that we did not win the game, of course. We played at home, we had a great opportunity and we have a start like we did. Of course it’s frustrating and the players will have to learn from that and respond very well and very quickly in a very convincing way.”
It’s not going to be so easy to respond against Chelsea as it would normally be after a defeat, but Wenger refused to blame the fact that he was stranded in the stands after his suspension when he was asked by the media, because he didn’t think there were any problems in the preparations. “I don’t know. It’s very difficult to know. It would be an easy excuse. I think, honestly, we prepared well, we warned that Watford would come and make it very physical and I have no basic regret, looking at the preparation, in the way that we prepared for the game. And did we think subconsciously that we will turn up and it will work? I don’t know. But from the stands I agree with you that our first half was not at the level that we wanted.”
Arsenal did try to come back in the second half, as we have done so many times already this season, but we are now left 9 points behind Chelsea, so Wenger was asked if the Gunners simply had to beat them next weekend to still have a chance in the title race? He replied: “We want to respond and win the game of course. First, we have to analyse why we didn’t start well. There are some situations in our team which were not completely clear at the start of the game, and we have to analyse that well.”
To be honest, this is hardly the first time that the team haven’t started well, but it has been masked by some great comebacks from losing positions. It simply had to come to a head some time and so it proved. Surely this fact should have analysed to death by now surely?
Any previous analysis has obviously had little effect!
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