Facing Tottenham, Bayern Munich and Chelsea in the space of a week will be a stern test for any side on a run – and two wins and a battling draw can be considered nothing but a positive return, but Arsenal may feel they could have done even better.
After a brilliant performance to beat rivals Spurs before dispatching Bayern at the Emirates, Sunday’s match with Chelsea was always going to be difficult with limited recovery time.
And with key centre-back William Saliba out with an injury in training the preparations have been further hampered – the France international is set for more tests.
Given that context, getting a 1-1 draw through Mikel Merino’s header to put the Gunners five points clear at the top of the table is far from a bad result. But after Moises Caicedo’s red card saw his team playing with 10 men for most of the match, even manager Mikel Arteta admitted the chance to extend the lead was missed.
“It’s been a big week, starting with the derby,” he said. “Then three days later we had to play Bayern Munich (and) we lost players in those games.
“For example, today we had to play a partnership (in defence) that we had never played before in a tough match.
“The captain is still not here (Martin Odegaard), the nine is still not here (Victor Gyöckeres), Kai (Havertz) is still not here, we also lost Leo (Trossard) in midweek, but the team had to react to that.”
Odegaard and Gyöckeres came off the bench for the Gunners in the second half at Chelsea.
“I think overall it has been a really positive week because the difficulty was so great,” Arteta said.
“But I have the flavor that we should have had today and we could have won the game and we didn’t. That’s the thing to learn from it.”
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