Last summer saw Arsenal fans very optimistic about us winning the title, but the combination of the World Cup hangover and an incredibly long injury list scuppered our chances of keeping up with Chelsea in the early stages of the campaign, but this year Arsene Wenger sounds even more confident of challenging but he’s refusing to commit himself to predictions.
He was asked about our title chances after Arsenal slaughtered Lyon today: “Let’s be cautious on that front.” he said. “We finished third in the league and won the FA Cup last season. That’s a good basis, of course. Our target is to do better. We know that we will put all of our effort in and that it will be very difficult because it will be a big challenge. We just want to focus on our quality.
“Top-level sport requires you to get the best out of your potential, so to achieve that it’s important that we focus on our own performance and do not worry too much about the others. We just have to focus on being as good as we can be.”
The Gunners had a brilliant run at the end of last season, and we all were praying that we carried on that consistency into this season,and it is looking good so far. Wenger agrees with this statement. He said: “It was a good, dynamic, collective performance where we could see that many players scored goals. Overall it’s in the continuity of what we did at the end of last season, and we’ve taken that form into pre-season as well. There’s a good team dynamic and we’ve shown again that we can score goals, which is what everybody expects from us.
“We have more cohesion than at the same period last year. Everybody has a better focus. Last year was a post-World Cup year and some players came back mentally exhausted. Hopefully we can take advantage of that this season.”
Cohesion is definitely Wenger’s favourite word this month, and we can’t deny that the team have looked extremely good in our games so far. Next week we play the Champions Chelsea and I can’t help but feel that (for a change!) we actually have the form and the impetus to show them how much we have improved. And surely Petr Cech will be playing out of his skin tostop them scoring…..