Mikel Arteta has actually urged he will certainly quit on the title race “over my dead body” and recommended Arsenal can have discovered themselves in mid-table this period offered their bad corrective document.
Arsenal head to third-placed Nottingham Forest on Wednesday tracking the leaders, Liverpool, by 11 factors after surrendering their 15-match unbeaten Premier League run versus West Ham.
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Myles Lewis-Skelly will certainly miss out on the journey to the City Ground after his red card on Saturday took Arsenal’s tally for the period to 5, 2 greater than any kind of various other club. Arteta stressed he had actually not surrendered hope of capturing Arne Slot’s side yet likewise thinks ending up as runners-up for a 3rd succeeding period would certainly be an overachievement offered the suspensions and injuries his group have actually needed to get rid of.
“It’s been incredibly satisfying to work every day with the players and the coaches and the staff to try to overcome certain situations,” he claimed. “So if somebody tells you at the start of the season: ‘By this time, you have played five times with a red card over half an hour in each of those games, and you have lost this amount of players,’ what’s the bet? You are in the middle of the table, at least, you know, and you are out of the Champions League.
“That’s not the situation. So that tells you the resilience, the resources, the ambition that the team has, every individual has, and that has been probably in my time one of the proudest moments to work in that sense. The thing is that when you are there, you want more and you want more and you want more. And I’m not going to stop; over my dead body. We’ll stop thinking that way and putting everything that we possibly can to increase the probability of us winning and being better than the opponent and being hitting that performance and those standards constantly, regardless of what happens.”
Asked whether he still thought Arsenal can upgrade Liverpool, he claimed: “If not, I’ll go home. Mathematically, it’s possible. You are there, you have to play every game. Suddenly, three days ago, we could close the gap and you are like: ‘You are one and a half games away.’ It doesn’t matter. We have to continue to go.”
