Petr Cech says that at times in the past Arsenal were too focused on style over substance, and says that any title winning side needs to be able to ‘win ugly’.
This is a good thing because winning ugly is more or less what we’ve done in our last four Premier League games: the performances haven’t been as impressive as people might like, but there’s no arguing with the results.
The 2-0 win over Everton on Sunday was a case in point. The Gunners struggled to get a hold of the game in the first half, but after goals from Alexandre Lacazette and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, we ground out the win to take us to 12 points and 6th place in the table.
Speaking to the Islington Gazette afterwards, the veteran keeper said, “The Arsenal way was more important than getting the points sometimes. This is not sometimes how you win the league.
“Sometimes you need to make sure you win ugly games when you are not completely playing well and you just dig deep and you just closed the back door and win 1-0 no matter how.
“I think this is what we lacked since I arrived in the last three years this is what we lacked.
“For any club who’ve won titles in recent years you have that know how how to finish it off. You can see that in any sport. Take Tiger Woods.
“Five years it’s been since he won a major tournament – the longer it goes the harder it becomes. This club haven’t won the league for more than ten years so you need to get back into knowing how to do it.
“We started off with the new manager from scratch and we’re trying to get a mentality of winning every game, progressing every game, working every day and hopefully we can build this up and win the title sooner rather than later.”
The 36 year old was Arsenal’s man of the match on the day, drawing praise from boss Unai Emery who said he found it hard to understand why there had been so much criticism of his number one.
“Petr has a big experience and a big quality,” he said. “He’s started the season very well and we think he’s giving us the performance we want.
“I’m a little surprised because there have been a lot of questions over Cech. In pre-season and also in the first matches with us, he’s played with good performances.”
Bernd Leno will likely get the nod again for Wednesday’s Carabao Cup tie with Brentford, with Cech to return for Premier League action on Saturday against Watford – against whom he saved a penalty last season.
We have had better looking sides, that’s true.
Lacazette’s goal did look pretty good.
True. But I would love to win nice sometimes.
That’ll come, I’m sure, but it’s undoubtedly been an issue the last few seasons that when things don’t go our way we haven’t played beautiful football and we also lost
Maybe this has something to do with us not signing anyone from Spain?
From now on ,just win always pleaseeeee
Next weekend will see us top four. We beat Watford, while Huddersfield take care of our north London neighbours.
I thought this was quite a very honest interview and not the standard rhetoric – I mean from reading the Guardian article it seemed a bit like he was criticizing Wenger for being a purist and not pushing them enough.
Found that a bit tough to take especially as I’ve been a massive Wenger fan, but I guess it is true if it’s coming from Petr.
I definitely get that he’s honest in his comments but where were these performances last season when Wenger needed him the most? He wasn’t keeping us in games to help us win ugly then, ( like De Gea for example everytime Utd were muck), he was awful last year yet Wenger stuck with him and Cech never repaid his faith. Honest in his comments, dishonest to his federation.
I concur with Cech and I value the victory over aesthetic football all day. But I find a bit low to criticize Wenger’s methods after he left, as we know he’s one of the club captains and (should) has the responsibility to discuss tatics and methods with the managers.
Winning this ugly is a massive step forward. 3 ugly points most welcome.
Winning it ugly is nice. But it would be nicer to be able to win without playing like shit for the entire first half, and looking like we’d get properly beaten against a better side. It’s that which concerns us more of course. It would be ideal if we could win ugly, by defending well throughout the game, attacking in phases, and scoring from a corner via the shoulder region of Danny Welbeck. I’d take that over the first half against Everton or Newcastle the week before.
I don’t think it was that ugly a win. We had moments where we threatened to just tear them apart as well. We were under duress by a very robust team with the excellent Richalison and the more predictable Walcott offering threat behind our fullbacks. If anything, if Monreal was Mustafi or Granit, there would be much ire. The Spaniard was too high twice which led to golden opportunities for Calvert-Lewin AND Walcott one on one with Cech. BUT alas the inconvenient truth is some players get cast as villians for every single little mistakes where people tend to overlook… Read more »
Omg you’re back
Who plays GK was a key decision to make for the new manager. While a lot of pundits were criticising Cech and Unai for it, now everyone is agreed on the MOM performance the last game. Pundits go over the top these days. However they do need to realise that most of them couldn’t/wouldn’t make it as managers and got into punditry. Wenger in all his wisdom made it clear that ex-players like Henry and Viera can make it as managers, if they are willing to sacrifice their lives and suffer. It’s easy to criticise from afar. I hope Unai… Read more »
Yeah, if only we had decisively put our eggs in the Almunia (or Fabianski) basket. They would’ve pushed us on to the League title with their Golden Gloves display. Errrr…