Maybe the Arsenal defender was not aware of what Jose Mourinho, the Lex Luthor to Arsene Wenger´s Superman, said this week about the Gunners and our failure to challenge them for the Premier League title. Or maybe the World Cup winning German just does not care, but he has agreed with the Chelsea boss and his assessment of our season, as reported by The Mirror.

Mourinho did not put it quite the same way of course, with his jibe about Arsenal asking FIFA if the BPL season could run from January to April, but the conclusions were the same, that our failure to get going cost us a proper chance of the trophy. Mertesacker went further as well and blamed the hangover felt by Mesut Ozil, Lukas Podolski and himself after winning the World Cup in Brazil.

He said, “We had a kind of post-World Cup trauma for half a year.

“The first months, in particular, were quite difficult to come back and to come down and to forget that, forget that feeling of being World Cup champion.

“That’s what you need to have, you need to forget about that, to come down a bit, to calm down and to restart. That took nearly half a year to realise that.

“Most of the players got injured, I avoided that but didn’t play at my best, but that was because I hadn’t experienced this feeling before. I didn’t know how to handle the situation. I tried to forget about that, about the World Cup.

“At one point I was happy not to get an injury, but on the other hand it was very difficult to find the form and the fitness, because we hadn’t had that pre-season and the season was already being played when we just started. It was very strange.

“Mentally it effects your body as well you know. You can’t say one or the other. It was just the whole thing. Without pre-season, physically as well to come back to compete at Premier League level.

“I knew maybe there would be some criticism to form, but I didn’t get injured so I tried to prepare even more – doing more yoga, more treatment, more things like that to come to a certain level where I can compete again. From my experience, it took half a year.”

So on that note I guess we Arsenal fans should want anyone but Chile to win the Copa America this summer.

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