Arsene Wenger reckons Arsenal are in a catch 22 situation when it comes to the fitness of their players after several sat out Sunday’s remarkable 4-3 opening day defeat to Liverpool.
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The Switzerland worldwide, on the other hand, came on in the second half as he took over from Mohamed Elneny in midfield.
“At 4-1 we maybe got a bit complacent, a bit over the top”, the England worldwide told Liverpool’s official website.
“We have to be ready next week because we go to Leicester”. But we have a benchmark now and we can assess it and look at things we need to improve on. “We’ve now got a good week’s training again and away to Burnley next”. We were working on them a couple of days ago – there’s just no chance anyone is getting anywhere near a free-kick. The Gunners had some weaker players starting, and Liverpool maybe performed slightly worse because of that, but we managed to get the win despite feeling the pressure in moments.
The man beaten by the free-kick, Petr Cech, seemed to endure an opening day to forget as images posted on Twitter after the match appeared to show he had pranged his auto while trying to leave the Emirates.
While the 20-year-old’s distribution was consistently good throughout, he could do little as Jurgen Klopp’s men overran the midfield to score three further goals within 18 minutes of the restart.
Cech said in the London Evening Standard: “As a player we understand the supporters came with the ambition to win the first game of the season. You can not be happy because you should not concede four goals at home, but I thought it was a really good experience for them”.
“We didn’t start well in the game”.
“The momentum shifted when they got an equaliser in the last minute of the first half”.
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Still, it’s brilliant that Klopp was able to explain to his players what was going wrong tactically – which enabled us to completely change the game. The second half started with the Gunners under the cosh and conceded three more goals before staging a mini comeback of their own. We were punished by the Adam Lallana goal to go 2-1 down and once we fell behind we opened the game too quickly and allowed them three, four, five counter-attacks.
