Arteta rues key tactical call that was Arsenal’s downfall against Leicester
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta admitted that a key tactical decision at 0-0 allowed Leicester the initiative to score their winning goal on Sunday.
Jamie Vardy scored once more against the Gunners to seal the Foxes’ first league win at The Emirates in 47 years.
The second-half diving header came after Alexandre Lacazette had his own header ruled out for offside.
That initial incident came in the first half, a 45 minutes in which the Gunners had chances of their own. But Arteta admitted that his decision to “attack” the space in the second half was his team’s downfall.
“To be fair I was really pleased with the first half. The way we pressed and the aggression we showed,” the Spaniard said (via football.london).
“We were effective with that and restricted them to nothing. We scored the goal on the set piece which I don’t know how it got disallowed.
“We needed to be patient and not to make any errors, we made the decision when there is no pressure on the ball to try and attack that space and they scored a good goal.
“We didn’t manage to have enough continuity in our play, we didn’t put the ball as often as we could in the box. It’s a very harsh for result for us considering what happened in the game.”
Lacazette‘s goal was ruled out after Granit Xhaka was adjudged to have impeded Leicester goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel as the header travelled across the box.
Arteta admitted that he felt frustrated at the decision to overrule the goal, which had a “massive” impact.
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‘We can’t change it now’
“Granit is behind Schemichel so it’s nothing to do with him. They made the decision and we can’t change it now,” the manager said.
“We can have our view but we have the specialists who made the call and it obviously had a massive impact on the game.
“We are two teams where the marginals are minimal but we still should have not lost the game.”
Arsenal are back in action on Thursday when they face Dunkalk in the Europa League.
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