So Arsenal have now lapsed back into last season’s deficiencies on the road and we have now gone five away games without a win. I don’t think we can use our long injury list as an excuse this time as we have got quite a lot of our players back in contention.
If you look at the bare stats it looks like it was a very even game, with both sides having 11 shots on goal, but the Arsenal strikers were very off form and only got 2 of them on target as opposed to the Hammers 3, one of which was the decisive one that cost us the points. After the game Emery felt that we should have won the match and considers it an opportunity lost. This is what he told Arsenal.com: “I think the result is a bad one. We lost a great opportunity to take three points and get closer to Chelsea and the other top-four teams. But we lost.
“We wanted to do a better match but we couldn’t control the match like we wanted to. Looking at the chances in the 90 minutes for them and us, I think maybe the result is not what we deserved. In the gameplan, in the control, we need to improve our ideas. We could not do that. We didn’t concede a lot of chances but we conceded metres on the pitch and these metres gave them a lot of corners. From one corner, they scored, and then the match changed. We needed to attack more and better but today, defensively we needed to work well. We created chances but it wasn’t enough to win. Maybe in the first 20 minutes when we created some chances, that was the moment where we thought we could win the match, but then after it was difficult because we didn’t impose all the things we wanted.”
Is that a fair summing up? Were Arsenal simply unlucky that we didn’t take our chances or did we simply lose to a better side?
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