Former Manchester United defender Gary Neville has been proven right over his claim that Arsenal must tighten up their defence to win the Premier League title this season. It comes after the Gunners have dropped points in their previous two games after racing into a 2-0 lead.
The side have now conceded 19.35 percent of all their goals this season in their last four games, with their title race lead cut in half from an eight point lead to just four. With a game in hand and a head-to-head at the end of the month, Manchester City are well placed to win the title as much as Arsenal are too.
However, the flood of goals are a clear problem that has to be solved by Mikel Arteta, with a warning coming from Neville in February.
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Speaking on The Gary Neville Podcast, he said: “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."
In his assessment of the game against West Ham, Arteta put it down to not being ruthless enough, giving 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."
With the last clean sheet coming in early March, the manager has his work cut out for him in getting the team stable at the back again or risk their title hopes fading.
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