Mohamed Elneny returned to the Arsenal first team last night for the 1-0 win over FC Zurich in the Europa League. The Egyptian international had been missing since the Fulham victory in August after sustaining a serious hamstring problem.
Coming off early in the second half, he watched from the bench as his Arsenal teammates managed to top their Europa League group and land a second successive win going into the game with Chelsea on Sunday. The London derby has the obvious narrative fuelled by Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s move to the Blues.
A BT Sport promo for the match saw Aubameyang stoke up the derby saying: "Arsenal, nothing personal. I’m back. I’m blue. I’m ready."
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When asked about his reaction to seeing his former teammate join a direct London rival, Elneny was more focused on the task his side had. Taking a very simplistic view of the situation.
“Now we just focus on ourselves now,” Elneny replied. “Aubameyang was one of our players and now he decided to go to a different team. Now we just focus on ourselves, and we look to win the game.”
However, Elneny did reveal plenty about the reaction of when Aubameyang was stripped of the captaincy. The experienced midfielder provided an interesting insight into the minds of the players after seeing their dressing room focal point removed from a position of leadership and confirmed this was the moment that Mikel Arteta truly established himself.
“100 per cent,” he said. “Now everyone looked at themselves because Mikel did that to the captain of the team.
“What is he going to do with another player? This showed that now we can’t play around, now we have to be calm with the team and the way the team is going we have to stick with the team, not do something different.”
The Arsenal dressing room has shown a true unity in these past few months which has culminated in topping the Premier League come the end of October as well as progressing through to the round of 16 in the Europa League as group winners. football.london asked Arteta what he had learned from the heavy October schedule, and he immediately highlighted that togetherness in the group to respond to bad results.
“How lucky I am to have them together with me and again especially when we lose, or draw, how united we are, and how we respond to that, and today I think it was a really good example,” Arteta explained. “We know the schedule we facing now, we’re going to be facing in January, it’s really, really demanding so we need to face it and we want to do it in the best possible way.”
Elneny went further when asked about the lack of ‘big egos’ in the group to state that this was simply not accepted in the team. Emphasising further the dynamic that Arteta has looked to build with his team.
“We don’t allow big egos. This is the dressing room we have now," he said.
“Everyone loves each other, and everyone works for each other. This is what actually makes our squad really strong because we don’t have egos in the team.”
Despite a strong record at Stamford Bridge, this will be the first time in a long time that Arsenal arrive in west London as favourites. This added pressure will need the humility of a group to understand their roles, ignore the dramatic storylines and focus on getting the job done.
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