Former Manchester United captain and defender Gary Neville has been spot on over his claim that the Gunners need to tighten up their defence to clinch the Premier League title this season. The Gunners have dropped crucial points in their previous two games after having led 2-0 in each match and subsequently losing the lead.
The Etihad side have now conceded 19.35 percent of all their goals this season in their last four games, resulting in their title race lead cut in half from an eight point lead to just four. As it stands, with a game in hand and a head-to-head at the end of the month, Manchester City are in equally good standing to win the title as much as Arsenal are as well.
With this scenario it is then understandable why the flood of goals conceded are a clear cause for concern – a problem anticipated by Neville in February –that has to be solved by Mikel Arteta.
The Sky Sports pundit said on The Gary Neville Podcast: “I would say they need to stop conceding goals because one of the traits on a run-in is, if you’re conceding goals and teams feel like they have a chance, it’s very difficult to win a league, so they just need to watch that. If they can just think about, in this next week or this next period, getting back to clean sheets – it’s really important.”
Arteta, on the other hand, when it came to assessing the match against West Ham, attributed it to not being ruthless enough, which gave the opposition hope of a comeback.
He told reporters: “Started extremely well again. Dominated the game, dominated the pitch and scored two beautiful goals. After that we made a huge mistake to stop playing with the same purpose to score the third and fourth one and just thinking we could play around them and maintain the result and just looked too easy.
“At that moment we gave them hope. Credit to West Ham, they took it. They defended really well. They started to play extremely direct with long throws and corners. If you don’t defend the box the way you should with the two goals that we concede, then you have to do many things better than what we did.
“There is another moment where you could go 3-1 up after 50 minutes and probably the game is over. Two minutes after that you concede the equaliser. This is part of football. My worry is after 2-0 that we made that huge mistake and didn’t understand what the game required in the moment.”
Clearly the manager has his work cut out for him in getting the team stable at the back again with the last clean sheet coming in early March, or risk their title hopes fading.