While Arsene Wenger admitted that Arsenal were not at their best in yesterday´s trip to West Brom, the Frenchman also bemoaned his luck and said that his players deserved at least something out of the game.

In the post match interview reported on the Arsenal website the boss referred to that slip and miss from the penalty spot by the normally technically superb Santi Cazorla and suggested that it was a once on a million event that cost us at least a point.

Wenger did not sound like he was sucking on sour grapes and he made sure ti give due credit to Tony Pulis and the West Brom team for their determined and committed performance but he also clearly felt that the Gunners had made it a little too easy for them to get back into the game after we dominated the early stages and took a deserved lead.

The Arsenal manager said, “It was a bad afternoon, we missed a penalty, we gave a goal away on set-piece, that is perfect to make your afternoon a nightmare and we missed open goal chances.

“I believe that West Brom they were strong in the fight and they had 100 per cent commitment as well and you have to give them credit for that. But overall I felt it dropped a huge blow when we scored and we just had to make sure they didn’t come back with a easy goal and that is where we were disappointed today.

“But I cannot be mad at the team because they gave what they could until the last minute but we lost a bit of focus at 1-0 – at 35 minutes we were 1-0 up and then at 45 we were 2-1 down. Our defending on that level was very, very poor.

“I have seen a few [penalty misses] but I don’t really know what happened. You can talk to him and he is so disappointed and it is difficult to blame Cazorla for that.

“We have to take it on the chin and bounce back in our next game. It is a big blow today for us as if the game reflects the result then okay but when you drop points when you have come out of a game and think you have not done the maximum to produce you cannot be happy.”

Is Wenger right or were Arsenal just not good enough?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.