{"id":401323,"date":"2026-01-09T05:31:23","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T05:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/401323\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T05:31:23","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T05:31:23","slug":"arteta-the-boys-deserve-praise-for-this-period-interview-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/401323\/","title":{"rendered":"Arteta: \u201cThe boys deserve praise for this period\u201d | Interview | News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We extended our lead at the top of the table to six points, despite failing to breakdown a resolute Liverpool side at Emirates Stadium on Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>In a game of few chances we prevented Liverpool from having a single shot on target, but didn\u2019t create enough ourselves at the other end to earn a victory.<\/p>\n<p>But the draw it made it eight games unbeaten in all competitions, after an intense Christmas and New Year period where we have regularly been playing twice a week.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>After the game Mikel Arteta was left to rue a missed opportunity, but praised the team for their efforts lately.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWell, we&#8217;re disappointed because we wanted to win the game,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think overall, with the domination and the situations that we created in the first half, we should have come out of that in a winning position, and that&#8217;s the margins in this game.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou&#8217;re not going to dominate the whole game against the champions, because they are a really good side.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut when we have them there and created a situation where we&#8217;re having the best spaces to put the ball, find somebody and put the ball in the back of the net, and we didn&#8217;t do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThen in the second half, we were very inconsistent with the ball, losing balls that were very unusual for us &#8211; I don&#8217;t know if they were the conditions, the fatigue, whatever it is &#8211; and then we struggled more to have the right structure and be in distances that we can press them.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you cannot win it, at least we get a point, and I think the boys deserve a massive praise for what they&#8217;ve done in this Christmas period to get the results and the performances consistently in the manner that we&#8217;ve done it to come out from this period in a really strong position.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After a period when all of the teams have dropped points over the heavy schedule, we have opened up a six-point gap at the top of the table, and we remain unbeaten at home this season.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn paper you play every two or three days, and it&#8217;s really tough. And the demands that we have to win every single game, and the opponents that we played. Huge congratulations to the players for what they&#8217;ve done in this period; how they maintain the desire and focus throughout this period that you can get very distracted. And you see how tough it is for every team.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Copyright 2026 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We extended our lead at the top of the table to six points, despite failing to breakdown a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-401323","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}