March 17 News Early this morning, Arsenal were eliminated by Sporting Portugal on penalties in the Europa League, stopping at the round of 16
, Arteta accepted an interview with BT Sports after the game.
Arteta said: “It’s obviously a huge blow to go out. In the first 75 minutes, there were moments where we were not at our level. We kept handing over the ball and we didn’t have the ability to win the game.
It was a very difficult game with a lot of uncertainty in penalty shootouts.”
“We didn’t win enough tackles in some positions, we didn’t press enough. We kept giving the ball away and that created a very open situation, which we didn’t want.”
“Fu Anjianyang and Saliba suffered injuries, which limited our substitution adjustments, because we only had one time window for substitutions and there were not enough substitutes available.”
“The team has a good chance to win the game, we can only focus on ourselves now and see why we didn’t play well enough to qualify. We congratulate Sporting for qualifying, now we have 11 games to go, we will be next with
The Crystal Palace game is a final and everything we do now has to be against Crystal Palace and we have to perform better than we have shown in this game.”
(Goblin Slayer)