Arsenal failed to score at home for the first time this season in their 2-0 defeat against West Ham (Picture: Getty)
Mikel Arteta was left to rue Arsenal’s profligacy after they set an unwanted record in last night’s 2-0 defeat against West Ham.
The Gunners missed the opportunity to reclaim top spot in the Premier League after goals from Tomas Soucek and Konstantinos Mavropanos sealed a first Emirates Stadium win of David Moyes’ managerial career.
Arsenal squandered numerous opportunities to haul themselves back into the contest with Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Jesus particularly culpable of missing chances they would have been expected to score.
The home side’s territorial dominance was underlined by the fact they registered a record 77 touches in the opposition box, but failed to find a way past Alphone Areola.
Asked for his response to that ominous statistic in his post-match press conference, Arteta said: ‘They were great, we have to put the ball in the net and win it, and as well because the two situations in the box we have to defend in the box, we didn’t defend it well enough.
‘It’s a team that are really good in the box, with the timing, the quality they have with the front players arriving and that’s what made the difference today unfortunately and it is a very disappointing night for us because I think we should have got much more from the game.
‘It’s what it is, we have to try to generate. If we don’t score goals in thirty shots, we have to do fifty or sixty to try to score ,it’s the only thing. I cannot imagine a game that you have more dominance, more touches in the box, less situations of the opponents against a really good West Ham side, but today wasn’t enough to win the game.
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‘It is, but this is football, when the team generates that much normally you are going to win games and that’s the way we have done it, because as well against Brighton we generate so much, against Liverpool as well.
‘But we score goals in different ways and we have to make another step in that area to win the game more comfortably for sure, because today the team deserves to win the game, there’s no question about that.’
Arsenal’s cause was hardly helped by the controversial VAR call that led to Soucek’s opener but Arteta refused to blame that incident on a damaging defeat.
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He added: ‘I haven’t seen it, the only thing they are saying is that it’s not conclusive the images that they have.
‘It’s just a shame that with the technology that we have that it’s not that clear that we can say yes that it was out or in. It’s done, it’s gone, nothing we can do about it now.
‘The technology we have at the moment is not good enough to give us that answer. So what we have to do is without that, win the game with the amount of situations that we generate in the game it should have been more than enough’
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