Arsene Wenger made a particular point of calling out the time-wasting tactics of Southampton as he reflected on his side’s hard-fought 1-1 draw at Saint Mary’s.
Here’s what the boss had to say on the match when facing the BT Sport cameras…
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On the point…
“Happy? No, because we wanted to win. But when you can’t win, at least don’t lose it.
“I felt we played with an excellent spirit but unfortunately, in the last two games, we’ve dropped points for a bad start. We are caught straight away and after it’s difficult.
“In the second half we played in one half, it was important not to be caught on the counter-attack.
On the refereeing…
“As well, I felt the wasting of time becomes a real problem in England. The referees have not found the answer yet.
“I’m especially frustrated in the first half the referee didn’t give a penalty (for Yoshida’s challenge on Lacazette) and in the second half when we have a counter-attack we couldn’t take advantage of the foul made in the last minute. Overall, it was a very intense game.
On solving the issue of time-wasting…
“The answer [to time-wasting] is in the authority of the referee. First, it’s in the head of the players to respect the game and to play. And secondly in the authority of the referees to act early because it becomes really a problem in the last two seasons.
On Arsenal’s defensive frailties…
“Of course, you’re concerned [by the defensive frailties] but you don’t want to make too big a problem of it because it takes belief and confidence away from the players.
“You could see today that last week had an influence on today’s start of the game. the players wanted to start strong and overall, it took us time to get into the game.
On Olivier Giroud equalling the record for most goals off the bench…
I will start him, of course, because we play every three days. He’s come back into very good shape and he’s shown that again today. He is mentally extremely strong as well. You have to be grateful when a player that is needed comes on every time and [delivers], it’s a remarkable achievement what he’s done.
Always excuses.
Poor Arsene, just poor..
Listening to you if only the referees were better all our problems would be solved.
Stop whinging, buy better & get your players to do their jobs better please.
Actually we should be able to do a lot more with the team we have. It’s the manager that needs change.
Blame the 10 minuets of time wasting and not mentioning the 80 minuets of crab football. Typical of him deflecting the issue.
Have some dignity and leave our club, you’re has been and holding us back because you’ve no life outside football to be control freak with.
When is enough is enough?
Arsene IS the problem.
l quite like the idea of “crab football”. If anyone can train them to play, I’d pay to watch.
I thought southampton were the better team.we looked like we had no ideas.hector has to improve his final ball.
I would put debuchy right away after that awful performance of hectir
Totally agree, he has been terrible for more than one game along with Samhezvand Xhaxa
Have we signed a new player and I missed the memo?
Who is Samhezvand Xhaxa, mr Batty????
Focus on your fucking players starting off as bunch of twats and then maybe complain about the opposition. Love Ollie, time to bench Alexis, Kos and Bellerin in my opinion.
As usual under Wenger, no fucking fighting mentality, players being poorly motivated.
Dont quite understand what he means sometimes. Why make a big deal about time wasting and not about defensive frailties. The logical answer would be to make a big deal about the thing that you have control over right?
Distraction. Lots of idiots lap it up
Because he is a deluded arrogant old man who is 10 past his sell by date.
What’s the point in defending his players after a performance like today! No wonder the players are all comfy. Also, what’s the fucking point in holding on to Sanchez, he is a shadow of the player from last season and very much a distraction in the team, asking for the ball all the time, hardly passing to anyone, except to Ozil, disrupts the defensive shape as well asking others to randomly join his pressing. Yes, we have stopped him from joining a tram in our league but ManC are running away with the league, our competition is not them any… Read more »
He keeps criticism in-house, and for me that’s where it belongs
Some sense eh ignatz
Fans of Arsenal football club don’t like that bruv
Time wasting is the amount of time we waste not rectifying glaring issues from the bench.
And not working out sincecprevious encounter with United that we are prey to playing out from defense with a midfield with obvious limitations receiving.
sit in wasted no time in understanding this.
Frustrated by your wank management
Yeah because if we’d have had more time we could’ve gifted them even more chances….
Ha ha ha brilliant!!!!
Shame that Ozil starts to produce his best form when everyone around him looks shite. Thought he was quality again today but wasted.
Fuck knows what’s going on with our defence and it’s inability to cope with a high press.
Wenger does no defensive drills whatsoever. Whic( us why, week after week, season after season, we give away exac5ly the same kind of easily defendable goals. The defenders are all internationals. The problem is no5 with them. It’s with the utter lack of defensive coaching.
He has to go, the sooner the better.
How do you know he doesn’t do any defensive drills?
I made a considered guess. Based on the fact that, as per above, we make the same mistakes over and over and over again, season after season. Normally, when you practice for a specific situation you improve in the way you deal with it. Which is kind of the point of practice. Stop me if I’m going too fast.
watch the team
Some of the defenders that has flopped in this team over the years has always blamed it on the fact that the team set up always leaves them exposed. XHAKA and RAMSEY are both not defensive midfielders and we really need one, and a good one.
we played badly today, Southampton would had been 2 or 3 goals ahead if they grabbed their chances. Our defense was shocking, midfield ahead offer no protection, the attackers didn’t press their back line like how we did to spurs last time… I don’t know whether is because of the weather or something on the players’ mind.. xhaka was awful, the only reason why he is playing ahead of super jack is because wenger didn’t want to lose his reputation by admitting buying xhaka was a failure one… he was too conservative when the team is surging forward, he has… Read more »
Yes, time wasting is a real pain but everybody does it – even Arsenal. Get over yourself Wenger.
We change all these back room staff but honestly(not saying he is the main problem) but if We were to persist with Wenger(merits warts and all), we did ourselves no favours with Bould as his assistant.
You’d think an ex defender would recognise the issues on hand with us playing from the back.
He does nothing to influence Wenger into making timely and critical corrections from the bench be they tactical adjustments or subs
Wenger of all managers has not benefited bc he brought in a yes man instead of finding his own Carlos Queiroz.
That’s time wasting.
Bould may well be saying all we would hope but as the manager said the other day it’s his opinion that matters. We could say he should walk but the next man won’t be listened to plus I’m sure he likes the kudos and cash that comes with the position
Sadly we have a manager whos best days are looking gone and because he has no life outside of football can’t bear to wall away
Santori, I hope you saw klopp’s post-game interview today. If you did, I think you would be too embarrassed to go on another of your ‘the media hates Arsenal’ rants for quite a while.
Arsenal fans frustrated by under-performing squad…
We were lucky we got a draw. We could have played for a week like that & never have expected a better out come. “Time-wasting Saints” was the least of our worries.
Yes time-wasting is the problem, not the fact you haven’t been able to correct your multiple different assembled team’s defensive frailties.
Why not play Holding instead of aging Mertesacker. Also we need to finally change to a midfield 3 as we play without a DM right now which leaves our back 3/4 exposed again and again.
Why does the gaffer wait till 60“ and above before making a change. I’d like to see us revert to a back four asap so that some players can come into the fold.
Yea…even without the time-wasting, I couldn’t see us winning this one.
Today, we made Southampton’s defense look more organized than last week’s Manchester Utd team.
Me too, I too thought that we could have played for another 2 days and not scored. We were lucky to get away with a point, as saints were not as clinical as Man U were in front of goal!
Its just constant bullshit coming out of his mouth How do you expect to correct defensive issues if you don’t work on then and talk about them 2 more years of this shit at least. Like blogs article a few days ago re anger of where we are at. I think we’re just resigned to it and this is how it is. I have zero expectation of arsenal now a days. We put in an occasional performance shoot ourselves in the foot and get patted on the head. We seem to think more possession is something to be proud of.… Read more »
Bang average… They’d be lucky if they could make it to Europa league next season… These lame excuses do not help at all! Cut the team, release at least 10 of these average Joes and try again…
No wonder we are clueless on the pitch. Our manager doesn’t even know what game management is!
They got a goal, created a lot of chances, then retreated to see if they could hold on.
Arsene Wenger is Peter Bosz of Arsenal.
Yeah, Wenger you’re right. These teams should just let us play through them and be happy about it.
I’m frustrated by you signing for yet 2 more years and your average results in the last +10 seasons
The reasoning behind him signing a new two year contract was that we would improve. Week 16 last year we had amassed 34 points losing just two games.That was a very bad season for us. This season at the same point we have just 29 points having lost five already.
Wenger MUST be judged on performances and results just like everyone else.
Arsenal have not improved under him. In fact, we have become worse.
He has got to be replaced…
Every time I have seen Southampton play at our place, they time waste. It is so ingrained in them they even did it when we where ahead. A good manager should figure out how to beat the team regardless of their messing about. Excuses won’t get us the 4th place trophy
Play faster when you have the ball instead of 11 players doing David batty impressions
Time wasting, Wenger your the biggest time waster going just leave our club you clueless fool.
And I don’t buy the “but who else is out there to replace him” rubbish.
Or the “be careful what you wish for” cobblers either.
Arsenal are stagnating and falling behind.
The only thing worse than that is allowing it to happen in the first place.
Arsenal, with its huge resources and fan base can attract anyone.
Or they can stay with an old man who blames time wasting, referees, scheduling of games, opposition playing defensively, tiredness, nervousness and everything else except himself for Arsenal’s performance.
Arsenal have become a laughing stock because of this…
There are lots of teams that obviously time waste against us, I personally didn’t really notice it that much against Southampton. Maybe if we weren’t so shit defensively or could put away one of our many chances rather than trying to flick and trick our way to goal it wouldn’t matter how much time was wasted.
There are lots of teams that obviously waste time against all the big clubs…..it’a amazing how arsenal fans seem to think our club is the only one who suffer bad injuries or bad refereeing or bias from the media or horrible opposition tactics. Talk about a narrow focus.
Sorry bobbyp, that sounded much more directed at you than I intended it to be. Didn’t mean to attack you personally.
That’s ok mate. I get what you mean about other big teams getting the same treatment we do, but I was really just stressing that regardless of time wasting we need to defend better and put our numerous zillions of chances away.
Then get out of here.
Time wasting isn’t punished correctly, because the team that wastes time is always rewarded in one of two ways: -they waste time to preserve a point and not actually play football, thus preventing the opposition, and the fans, from enjoying a day of watching football -even though they waste time, should the team responsible for it somehow find themselves behind, the ref adds on extra minutes for them to play the match in and attempt to get a result. I don’t have an easy solution to fixing the problem, but when we see a goalkeeper sent off for it in… Read more »
Time wasting eh !!! Do me a favour everybody does it even us ! Another spin on an old excuse for the same old shit.
Southampton didn’t waste time to score and could have had 3 within the first 10 minutes had they been more clinical,this seems to happen every now and then,our defence isn’t well protected,ie we are lacking quality defensive midfielders period.It’s not like the other top teams have better defenders than us but they have solid defensive midfielders to protect them.
And Mr Wenger still will not start with Giroud. Because, I now believe, he is scared of Giroud starts scoring goals from start of match Wenger will have to explain why he has kept him out. He has kept him out because he doesn’t want to admit his recent signing are not good enough. Giroud is sent in to achieve in 20 mins what his first choice strikes fail to do in 70. He did not even try out Giroud with Laca / Sanchez in EVEN ONE match!! He could have but did not. He is too proud to admit… Read more »
typical wenger, moaning about the other side, trying to hide the fact that we were so shit
Agree that time-wasting is an issue. Agree that Giroud is an asset to the club. Agree that the defenders, of course, wanted to start well. Seems to me though that there are no answers ever given for why we make the same mistakes and why our attack had all the grace and exactitude of using a nerf gun in gale-force wing to knock down a brick wall.
I can take losing to United in the manner we did last week. Despite the point, this felt worse.
Usual Wenger refereeing excuses.
Boring……
This team has such strong mentality that they insist on giving the opposition free goals at the start .