"Looking back to what happened on the pitch, it’s not what we expect.” - Mikel Arteta

Arsenal played the Europa League quarter-final against Slavia Prague home leg last night, but yet again we were let down by our strikers not being able to put the ball in the back of the net as usual.

Mikel Arteta did change his forward line, but Saka, Smith-Rowe, Willian and Lacazette couldn’t deliver one shot on target between them, and we only scored when Aubameyang, Martinelli and Pepe were brought on for the last ten minutes. Other than Pepe’s goal, the only other player with a shot on target in the whole game was Rob Holding!

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So it was no surprise that Arteta had to face the press once again and rue the chances we missed that could have given us a healthy lead to take to Prague next week.

Arteta told Arsenal.com;

“What was missing is that when you create big chances in Europe, you have to take them.”

“I think we merited much more than the result that we got. When we made the most difficult thing, which was to score the first goal and just wait for the last four or five minutes and manage the game much better than we did, we failed to do that and then we gave them the opportunity in the corner and they scored the goal to tie the match and [put us] in a different position. Looking back to what happened on the pitch, it’s not what we expect.”