The win over Wolves moved us to just 3 points behind yesterday’s opponents in the last Guaranteed European spot, but surely our aim now must be to try and get as high as 5th, and hope that Man City’s ban is upheld.
Obviously we are not going to catch Liverpool and Man City anyway, but Man United are just 6 points ahead, Chelsea 8 and Leicester 9. So it is quite possible that one or two of those could drop lots of points if we carry on winning and try and get into the Champions League spots.
The Wolves win was massive, and our next game is maybe even more massive being against third-placed Leicester. Mikel Arteta though refuses to look too far ahead and just wants to take one game at a time, as he told Arsenal.com when asked if the Champions League was still his aim. “I am in the race to try and win against Leicester and then let’s see what happens. Two weeks ago it looked impossible and we know the fixtures that we have in the next few weeks… we try to improve as a team every time to give us a better chance, the better we play the better we compete. At this level of intensity if we play like this against any team, we will make it hard from them, and then we will see.”
Judging by yesterday’s excellent performance there is no reason why we can’t do the same against Leicester and make it 5 wins in a row, and Arteta explained why he thought we had improved so much. “I think the reason we can win against any team is because at the moment we are enjoying suffering together.” he continued on Arsenal.com. “In difficult moments, if you can enjoy doing that then you will get rewarded because we have the ability afterwards to hurt teams. At the moment, we don’t have the ability to batter teams for 95 minutes. If you are not able to do that you have to be very able to compete and be a team. A team means that the 11 who started and all of the subs really make a difference in the game.”
So, if we see Arteta’s new team spirit get us another three points on Tuesday, maybe we can start dreaming again?
Onwards and Upwards!