The Arsenal and England international midfielder has given his own take on the Champions League win over Anderlecht in Brussels last night. And while the 22-year old Gunners accepts that we did not play very well and had to rely on a bit of luck to avoid defeat, never mind win, Jack also feels that the result was all important and the performance should not now matter to a certain extent, so is he right?
Wilshere told Arsenal Player that he thought that Arsenal had been getting things the other way around in quite a few games this season, by playing much better than we did last night but not getting the rewards, so he seems to think that we were due one. I have to agree in a way because I wrote an article saying something similar about our luck recently. But I don’t know if we can brush off the poor performance quite that easily.
Jack said, “We feel that we’ve been putting in performances but not getting results. Maybe we didn’t put in the performance here, but we got the result – and we’d much rather have it that way.
“We always felt we were in the game until the end, as long as we kept it at 1-0. We kept pushing and pushing – OK, they had a few chances, but that was always going to happen at 1-0.
“We had to look for a goal from somewhere and, once we got that, there was a feeling that they were dropping off a bit and we were pushing on to get that other goal. We showed great character again.
“It wasn’t our prettiest performance, but we won the game and that’s all that matters. We’ve been through a bit of a rough stage where we haven’t been winning games, so the main thing was to get the three points.
“That’s the best way to win [in the last minute]. We felt their frustration throughout the game. We kept getting in and then the final pass wasn’t right.
“They travelled a long way and wanted to see us win the game. Thankfully we could give them that win at the end.”
Sometimes this does happen in football and when a team is having a bad run they just need a bit of luck to get them going. If that turns out to be the case and the Gunners now go on a run and start clicking and showing our class on the pitch, then I will fully agree with Wilshere about last night’s result far outweighing the poor performance. But if we don’t, it will just have been one lucky result that papers over the cracks. So which do you think it will be?