<\/p>\n\n Read more Report: Arsenal 2-3 Villarreal <\/p>\n
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The game saw Jurrien Timber and Gabriel get some valuable minutes under their belts as they continued to recover from the injuries they sustained during the latter months of last season, which was another factor that pleased the boss.<\/p>\n
That, coupled with seven other players getting their first taste of life at Emirates Stadium in our colours means Mikel feels that many individuals have taken another step forward during pre-season, and hopes that continues against Athletic Club on Saturday when the new season will be just eight days away.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on the returns of our defensive duo, Mikel added: \u201cWe lost Ricky as well during the tour, so they’ve all been long-term injuries, very, very important players for us. They got some exposure today after four or five months, which is a long time, so that’s great news because we’re going to need everybody to raise the level and to compete with the quality that we want.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo get them through the door, their first experience here at Emirates and to get the reception that they all got. So thank you so much to our supporters because they really made us feel great.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re against a very good opponent again, so another great test. I hope a lot of people come here again and support the team the way that they’ve done today and hopefully we\u2019ll give them a better performance and result.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have another one on Saturday to finish our preparation and focus on the week against Man Utd.\u201d<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 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":"Despite being left frustrated to see us on the wrong end of a 3-2 defeat to Villarreal in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-64624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}