Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta has praised West Ham’s resilient play to give the Gunners their first home defeat of the season.
Thursday night’s match would have seen Arsenal leapfrog Liverpool and sit at the top of the EPL log if they had beaten West Ham; however, despite racking up 30 shots over the 90 minutes, they were left frustrated.
“I congratulate West Ham and praise my players, that’s what I can say. This is football. You look at what we’ve done in the game and how much we generated, and to see the result is very disappointing, but they were better than us in both boxes. They had two shots, with the penalty, three, we had thirty.
“I don’t know how many touches in the box, how many situations, how many open goals to score and we haven’t. In football, you have to do that better if you want to win, and today, we haven’t won because of that. The team kept trying for the rest and had an incredible attitude again,” he said in a post-match interview.
On his side’s missed chances, the Spaniard expressed his disbelief at Arsenal’s dominance in the game but credited David Moyes’ team structure.
“I cannot imagine a game in which you have more dominance, more touches in the box, fewer situations of the opponents against a really good West Ham side, but today wasn’t enough to win the game.”
The Arsenal boss further criticised the VAR decision as not being decisive enough to ascertain if Jarrod Bowen’s cross to Thomas Soucek should have stood.
“I haven’t seen it; the only thing they are saying is that it’s not conclusive the images that they have; it’s just a shame that with our technology, it’s not that clear that we can say yes that it was out or in. It’s done, gone, nothing we can do about it now.”
“I don’t know, but the technology we have at the moment is not good enough to give us that answer. So, what we have to do is, without that, win the game. With the number of situations, we generate in the game, it should have been more than enough.”
Arteta quickly rebuffed claims of his men lacking confidence, saying, “I don’t think it’s that. You hit the post, or you hit the ball, and it's half a centimetre, and you have, I don’t know how many shots, or someone blocks the shot, and it doesn’t come in. We miss a lot of situations when we have to pick the right pass. There are two players free in the box, and I can recall five or six actions of that, and that’s what makes the difference in winning the games.”
