There can be little doubting that Arsenal were deserved losers in their Premier League clash with Manchester City, but for a while there, the game was pretty even. When asked why his side ultimately came away with nothing, Mikel Arteta pointed to the individual errors of players like Takehiro Tomiyasu and Gabriel as reasons for it.
"That’s the frustration," he said of the self-inflicted nature of the defeat in his post-match press conference. "It’s exceptionally difficult to play at the level they require you to play to have a chance to win. I thought in many moments we did and we had them, but if you give three goals the way we did and don’t put away the big chances that we had the margin for error is almost zero. It’s a shame because we really had them."
To purely focus on what Arsenal did wrong though does something of a disservice to Arteta's former mentor Pep Guardiola. Throughout the 90 minutes the City boss may have provided Arteta with the recipe to get Arsenal out of their four-game winless slump when they take on Aston Villa this Saturday.
