The big German Per Mertesacker was our captain in Arsenal’s humiliating defeat at Tottenham on Saturday and by rights should be accepting some of the responsibility for allowing Harry Kane to punish us twice. Arsene Wenger clearly blamed the Gunners defence after the game, but Mertesacker thinks that we didn’t defend badly, and prefers to name other (rather cryptic!) factors for the loss.
“Obviously we’re not satisfied with that result,” he told Arsenal Player. “We weren’t active enough.
“Just at the end we started to play our game, but it took us too long. We didn’t defend badly but we couldn’t take advantage of any counter-attacks.
“It was very difficult for us, so we’re very disappointed that we couldn’t find our way to play.
“I think we reacted all the time. When you defend, you react sometimes. When we had the ball, we couldn’t find solutions.
“They were always at us – and we couldn’t get the ball so quickly in our half. We couldn’t make sure that we get good counter-attacks and good breaks to help.
“We’re very disappointed with a lot of ball losses, especially in our half. They lost the ball and we won it but then couldn’t find a solution to get out of the situations.”
I’m not quite sure what he is trying to say there, in fact i’m not even certain it is in English! “They lost the ball and we won it but then couldn’t find a solution to get out of the situations.” What does that mean? Perhaps ‘we couldn’t find anyone to pass it to’??
Would anyone like to try and translate what he said into plain English?