Arteta hails improved resilience
Going into this game everybody knew the potential it had to be a banana skin for Arsenal. The Gunners had been sublime throughout preseason, but a Friday night London derby to raise the curtain on the Premier League season had an eerily similar feeling to last season's opener. To make matters worse Selhurst Park had been the scene of the beginning of the unravelling of their top four hopes just a few months ago, and in his pre-match press conference Mikel Arteta admitted that the scars from that night were still to raw for him to even try to use them as motivation.
"I think that one is still pretty recent, so we don't need to dig too much into that," he said of April's 3-0 defeat. "We have players that didn't participate at all in that game, and it would be something that probably is not even worth mentioning. They are aware about the difficulty of tomorrow's match for sure."
