Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has hailed the impact of 19-year-old Bukayo Saka following a second consecutive win for the Gunners as they beat Brighton on Tuesday night.
Having switched over to the right flank for the last two games, Saka scored only his second goal of the season in the weekend’s victory over Chelsea and then got his first Premier League assist of the campaign to create the winner against the Seagulls.
Arsenal had failed to win back-to-back league games since the first two weeks of the season back in September but have now firmly put behind them a truly dismal streak where they had taken just five points from 10 games.
“I said last week that the best medicine against any illness in football is to win football matches,” Arteta reflected after the final whistle on the south coast, via Arsenal.com.
“[Saka] had a difficult game in the first half because we weren’t using certain moments to generate advantages for him and other attacking players in the right way, so the game became really difficult back to goal against a back five in a really low block.
“In the second half, the moment we started to play different was an attack in a different way where they found more space and capacity to unlock the situations and their block. We created four or five big chances and he was involved in most of the them.”
Arteta has admitted his players and staff are in a ‘much better mood’ thanks to back-to-back wins that will provide a seriously important confidence boost.
“We know how much we needed the wins,” the boss explained. “It wasn’t that much about our performances, it was about our results, but you need the results to establish that confidence, and now with two wins, I think everyone is in a much better mood.
“We have managed through this period to maintain our team spirit and cohesion, and sometimes that isn’t easy to do because obviously the frustration that comes out with defeat is normally an effect on the team, so hopefully now we can go on a run of games and be even more positive.”
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Source : 90min