It was an excellent day for Arsenal fans. Not only did we leapfrog West Ham into fifth but we also gained two points on all the teams ahead of us in the Premiership, and are now standing just three points behind Man United in Third Place.
Arsene Wenger was understandably pleased with a very hard-fought win. “We deserved to win the game.” he said. “It was a typical committed, direct game where we needed to be solid in the air, take our chances on the break. Unfortunately when they came back to 2-1, we had five or six chances on counter-attacks that we couldn’t take, but overall everybody did the job very well, from the ‘keeper to up front.
“With the ball I think we had a very different game today, but we always looked dangerous. We couldn’t finish the game off – it’s down to the quality of their goalkeeper. It’s down to sometimes missing our chances, sometimes as well maybe there was a player in a better position. Overall we created a lot of chances. When you look at the results today, there’s not too many goals. Forty-eight hours ago everyone played and of course that has a little impact.
“It was more fight than a creative game but you need to have that in England as well, especially when we played two days ago with 10 men for 40 minutes. When I looked at how much we gave physically against QPR, I was worried for today. We knew before the game that we had to dig deep to win because we were a bit jaded but we did that.”
The Arsenal boss also said that he has always been convinced that his team would climb back up to the Champions League positions. “I have always had that belief but it’s far from done.” he continued. “We just want to win the next game and be consistent in our performances. We were just caught by Liverpool in the last minute and today we won away from home.
“If you look at our recent results, we look to be more stable. We have a big game in front of us now against Southampton with nobody coming back. The players who played today have given their all and now we need to recover and prepare for the Southampton game.”
The Saints are Arsenal’s last obstacle to the Top Four and after giving Chelsea a run for their money yesterday will be no pushovers when we face them on Thursday, but we now have the momentum to push on, especially now we have Laurent Koscielny back to marshall our defence.
Onwards and upwards!