After seeing us battle back to earn a 1-1 draw in the first leg of our Champions League round of 16 tie against Bayer Leverkusen, Mikel Arteta answered questions from the media in attendance at the BayArena.
He spoke aout Kai Havertz’s crucial penalty, the impact of other players, what needs to improve in the second leg and much more. Here is everything he had to say:
on how important Kai Havertz’s goal could be:
Very important. The game had different phases, some in the first half when we were very dominant and we had a big chance with Gabi to make it 1-0 and when you miss those chances, obviously the game can change. Then after that, we didn’t finish enough actions, every time we got in and around the box, we gave the ball away and that allowed certain counter-attacks and that was very unlike us. Without really considering anything, we needed to show certain things.
We discussed that at half-time and we expected to start very fast, especially because we knew certain routines that they have on kick-offs, because they had three at the weekend and still, we got caught. We weren’t ready enough; we conceded a chance on the header and after that we conceded the goal. So, when you give that hope and advantage to the opponent at that level, they’re going to take it and then we had to really dig in because emotionally it becomes a very different challenge. We had 10-15 minutes that we didn’t really have enough threat and enough understanding of how we had to attack that block, but in the last 20 minutes, 25, with the changes I think it was much better. In the end, we found a way to score the goal and draw the game.
on what impressed him about Kai’s goal:
How composed he took it and yes, football is a funny game, and it brings special stories. Him coming back here after such a long time, being part of this club, to come here and score such an important goal, I think it’s a big moment.
on the mindset towards the end of the game:
That’s why I said that emotionally it becomes a very different game because you know that is a team that is very, very good in transition and you have more hurry and more rush to create danger to go and draw the game, and you can get caught while doing that. I liked that emotionally we understood what we had to do. The level of execution obviously has to be better and it will be better in the second leg. We will adapt a few things and then we’ll move on.
on Leandro Trossard:
He trained yesterday but he wasn’t comfortable to play. He said he was still feeling something and you need at this level the players at 100% and he wasn’t.
on why he took Bukayo Saka off:
I thought we needed something else and Noni has been contributing and being a real threat so I decided to make the change.
on Madueke winning the penalty:
I’m not surprised at all because that’s his biggest quality. He’s very brave at doing that and he’s a real threat so to have a player with that ability when we need him and to step in in the manner that he did, big credit to him.
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on if this result was a reminder at how difficult this competition is:
Yes, and how difficult it is to win against any opponent in the competition and especially away from home. There is a big factor there, probably then you realise what we’ve done to win eight games in a row in this competition because it’s so tough that nobody did it before. We’re fully aware of that, we knew the importance of the game and the difficulty of the opponent and now we need to finish it in London.
on Martin Odegaard’s absence and our attacking play:
Martin has different qualities but we have players with a lot of talent, and the execution of our actions obviously has to be at another level. You want to create much more threat in and around the box and today in many occasions it wasn’t. It’s part of football, you have to react after that and especially since I think that we did after regaining the ball, there wasn’t too much space to turn us and make us run backwards and that’s certainly something to improve.
on the plan for the second leg:
We will look at the things that we have improved, the situations that we can create and try to be especially much more efficient in a lot of simple things that today we didn’t do so well.
on if he was disappointed with the way we defended at the corner for Leverkusen’s goal:
There are always two sides to that – one is the element of the opponent, that they picked that weakness and that lack of attention or urgency in both situations. And the other one is us because we knew, we showed them three clips from last weekend in three different ways and we weren’t ready for it and we got caught.
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