Mikel Arteta found himself in a familiar position when he faced the media via Zoom on Sunday.
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Once again our manager was satisfied with much of our performance. But once again he was left frustrated by small details that ultimately cost us points.
Arteta was asked about the perils of facing this Manchester City side, his vocal encouragement from the touchline, Rob Holding’s head injury and the fixture congestion we currently face.
Read on for a full transcript of the press conference:
on whether he felt we did enough to get back into the game…
I do have that feeling but the reality is that when you play against the best team in Europe at the moment and you give them something, you’re going to make the game so difficult for yourself. To start the game the way we did, giving them the goal and the way that we did it, you have to be exceptional the rest of the game and you have to nail it in every single department and we didn’t do it. We had really good moments and we had moments where we really matched them up and and we made it tough for them. But the reality is that when we broke them and we got into the open spaces to attack them and get into some really good situations – which is really difficult to do against them – we lacked the final pass and the quality there to score.
