Our heavy defeat at Liverpool in August provoked plenty of soul-searching among the Arsenal squad over the international break that followed it.
The response was immediate, as we soon beat Bournemouth, Cologne and Doncaster, and gained a creditable draw at Chelsea.
Laurent Koscielny has been pleased with the response of the team and puts that down to several factors.
"Against Liverpool we didn’t play,” he said. “We didn’t run for our team-mates, we didn’t give a solution for our team-mates and so we had a lot of things that we didn’t do.
“We had to respond well after the international break and I think we did, because all of the players were focused on our jobs.
“The first one is the defensive job and I think everyone did it. When everyone runs on the pitch it’s then easier after to attack and we have the quality up front to score goals, but we need to push ourselves more to have the results we want.
“We feel stronger [now]. Physically we are better and we can see during the games, we run more, we can help our team-mates more on defensive jobs and we are more focused.
“After the defeat at Liverpool, we changed a lot of things and we could see that against Bournemouth and at Chelsea too. I think we need to keep this for the other games we’ll have because if we keep the same mentality, we can have some good results.”
Copyright 2024 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.
