Arsenal were knocked out of the Champions League on Wednesday, and they head to Anfield this weekend sitting 15 points behind Premier League champions Liverpool
Mikel Arteta has admitted Arsenal have gone “backwards” this season.
Arteta was brutally honest about his team falling short in the Premier League title race ahead of their trip to newly-crowned champions Liverpool on Sunday. Arsenal have enjoyed a memorable Champions League campaign after reaching the semi-final stage but they are currently more than TWENTY POINTS behind last season’s tally.
The Gunners are on 67 points with three games to go, they still have not secured a Champions League place and will fall well short of their total of 89 last year and 84 the year before. Gunners boss Arteta has been outspoken on how injuries and suspensions have hit his team but they have fallen well behind Liverpool when it was supposed to be Arsenal who stepped up.
Arteta said: “In the Premier League we’ve gone a step backwards. With the points that we have created it’s clear that we haven’t done as good as last season, that’s obvious. Yeah, for sure in the Champions League we have because we’ve done better than last season but not what we want because we want to win it.
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“For sure it has hurt, if it doesn’t hurt then it means you don’t love winning as much as I do that’s for sure. But you need to understand as well certain things that happened to understand.
“It was impossible to try to aim to get the same kind of points but what we did was to over perform when we could do so there’s a lot of ways to look at it when I sit down, have a look back and I will make a much better reflection of that.”
Incredibly, Arsenal have dropped points from winning positions on ten different occasions this season and also dropped points in 17 out of their 35 games.
That is hardly title-winning form and Arteta is still smarting over what he regards as the main reasons for falling short this time.
Arteta said: “Well the first one with the league there has been two main reasons. One is the amount of games and time that we have played with 10 men, and then the availability of the squad throughout the 38 games.
“It’s very, very difficult to manage and to have very strong performance consistently. We dropped a lot of points, we dropped a lot of points when we were ahead as well which is something that really needs to improve.”
But Arteta was also revealing in how he ultimately views this season because, despite some big European nights, they will finish the season empty-handed to make it five years without a trophy.
Arteta was emotionally charged after their Champions League defeat to Paris Saint Germain and admitted that some of his players were in tears in the dressing room. But he is convinced they will be ready to face Liverpool.
Arteta added: “Not winning trophies bothers me a lot because I love winning and absolutely hate losing. I don’t judge that and there are two words, success and failure, they are not part of my vocabulary.
“It was a very emotional moment after PSG, a very sad moment. We put a lot of hope and energy and work into that and we didn’t get the outcome. You need to go through that to become stronger and better and that’s what we do.
“But now it’s about this season because it’s not finished, we still have three games to play. I have been demanding and expecting much more, and after that much more. And after that much more. For me it is the only way to do it, for everybody to have really high standards and demands.
“We are very very close to achieving it. I understand the disappointment, and the criticism. It is all part of it. At the end there is one winner and the rest of them aren’t going to win, so they need to reinvent themselves and do better. That is part of the cycle.”
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