Arsenal’s unbeaten home run ended on Sunday as the Gooners suffered a narrow 3–2 defeat to Manchester United.
Arsenal showed resilience by taking the lead after a strong opening half hour and battling back to draw level late on, but the Gooners were ultimately undone when Matheus Cunha struck from outside the box soon after.
The North London side suffered only their third defeat in 35 games across all competitions this season, a bitter pill to swallow for Bukayo Saka and the Gooners.
“I think we didn’t show our best level for the full game, which is frustrating,” he said after the game. “It’s such a big game with a lot riding on it. Obviously, the Emirates has been a place where we’ve been so strong this season”.
“It’s a tough loss to take, but we have to stick together. We go again next week; we’ll try and get back to winning ways”.
“In football, you can score, you can concede – it’s your reaction after it. Obviously, we would have wanted to make it 2-0, but we didn’t. Overall, we’re just not too happy with the performance.”
Arsenal have no time to dwell on the setback, with Champions League action returning on Wednesday and another Premier League away trip to Leeds United next weekend, as Bukayo Saka insists the Gooners’ response will be vital.
“Yeah exactly. The journey’s not always going to be smooth, there’s going to be ups and downs. It’s up to us to show our character next week”.
“That’s all our focus is now, we can’t change the result now. We look forward and onto next week.”
Mikel Arteta also took responsibility for his side’s defeat, citing errors as a big issue.
“Difficult to say. I think the first one probably leads to the second one, and the fact that you want to be more protective probably doesn’t help to make those mistakes, because there were three or four [mistakes], to be fair, very unusual today in the game. They are part of football and sometimes you get punished and sometimes not and today we got punished and apart from that it has to be credit to the opponent for what they’ve done and in the manner that they managed to win the game.”