Despite heading into our game against Chelsea on the back of two defeats, Mikel Arteta is boosted by the mood in the camp and believes he and his players are hungrier for a victory than anyone can imagine.
We’ll arrive at Stamford Bridge on Sunday looking to return to winning ways after a difficult few weeks that have seen us claim just a point from our last three league outings, and lose to Inter Milan on Wednesday.
But Mikel was proud of our display in the San Siro, and that pride increased when he saw the positivity and desire to improve on show when everyone reassembled at the Sobha Realty Training Centre. That leaves him confident his side will return to winning ways if those traits remain when we cross the capital for our Blues showdown.
When pressed about the current state of the squad in his pre-match press conference, Mikel said: “When you don’t win it affects the mood and energy but the positive thing is that it is impossible that anyone in this room or outside wants to win more than I do, and these guys in the dressing room want to do.
“Today I had a meeting with them and sensed it straight away. What I sense as well is a big belief about how good we are as a team. But you need to take that into a winning football match because, in the end, that is the only thing that anybody is going to judge, not how superior you were to the opponent, that you outrun the opponent, you out-performed the opponent in every single way. It is about how they scored a goal and you didn’t. We have a problem, and that problem has to be resolved by scoring more goals than the opponent.
Every word from Mikel Arteta’s pre-Chelsea presser
“That’s the joy of this team. You go in there this morning thinking: ‘how are they going to feel after that and what will we talk about?’ and they are there paying attention. They are hungry, they want to do more, whatever we can do and it’s unbelievable. The desire we have, the togetherness, it’s just a joy to work with them.”
We last went three league games without a win at the end of 2023, but followed that up with a sensational run of form that saw us lose one of our next 25 in the Premier League, taking us up to the loss against Bournemouth last month.
With that in mind, the boss feels we are a much-improved side from the one he had to galvanise a little over a year ago, and feels only small tweaks have to be made this time around to get us back on track.
Comparing us to that previous spell, he said: “The results probably were very similar, but the context is very different because you tend to forget why you lost a full game against Bournemouth, or what happened what we didn’t win against Liverpool or the amount of situations we have had to go through.
