Wenger Following West Ham Win

Manager Arsene Wenger was obviously pleased with our two one victory over West Ham on Sunday, and for him the three points were thoroughly deserved.

Speaking to the Official Site following the full time whistle, the gaffer said of the win.

‘We deserved to win the game. It was a typical committed, direct game where we needed to be solid in the air, take our chances on the break. Unfortunately when they came back to 2-1, we had five or six chances on counter attacks that we couldn’t take, but overall everybody did the job very well, from the keeper to the front.’

With Arsenal now tied with Southampton for fourth place as we head into 2015 and the second half of the season, Wenger said he maintains his belief that we can and will finish in the top four this season, but obviously we have a long way to go before we achieve that yet with so many games left.

‘I have always had that belief but it’s far from done. We just want to win the next game and be consistent in our performances. We were just caught by Liverpool in the last minute and today we won away from home. If you look at our recent results, we look to be more stable. We have a big game in front of us now against Southampton with nobody coming back. The players who played today have given their all and now we need to recover and prepare for Southampton.’

Wenger went on to say about the top four, that of course we have ‘belief’ because we’ve done it for 17 years so he feels ‘entitled’ to be confident that we can do it again, but of course it’s tight and we have to make our games count.

Moving back to the game more specifically, he continued.

‘It was a very important game for us and we knew that we had a very physical game in front of us. I was a bit worried because we played with ten men for 40 minutes against QPR and had to turn up here two days later, but we had a united, combative and very solid performance. We are questioned a lot about our physicality and we had a good opportunity to show that we could do it – and we did it in a very convincing way.’