What happened on Saturday needs no repeating.

Arsenal turned up at White Hart Lane in great form and, for once, were expected to deal with a 12.45pm kick-off away from home with relative ease.

Settling on the approach that worked so well against Manchester City, Arsenal conceded possession and looked to hit Spurs on the counter, a tactic that was working until Arsenal began to forget about the ‘attacking’ bit.

Speaking to the press after the game, the captain, Per Mertesacker, did not hold back.

He said

“We found a way recently to prepare ourselves on crosses better defensively (and also) on set-pieces, but we did not switch on quickly enough and were not up for proper defending, so that was worse than in recent weeks.

“We were not active enough and only started to play our game a bit towards the end, that took us too long.

“When we had the ball, we could not find any solutions, they were always at us and we could not get the ball quickly in our own half so we could not hurt them on the counter-attack.”

His frankness was echoed by a visibly annoyed Arsene Wenger.

Speaking to the official site, the boss said

“It’s very disappointing because we started very well and then thought too much about defending, and not enough about playing.

“I felt we made too many technical mistakes in the middle of the park, and lost balls that are very unusual for us. On top of that, we gave two cheap goals away and that explains the defeat.

“The corners on the deflection, we could have [had] the ball and then on the second post we leave them completely free. On the second goal, I felt that we left them completely free to cross the ball and then had nobody in position.

“Before that, we could have won the ball in the middle of the park and if we had won it, we could have gone through. But we didn’t really go for the ball and after that, Kane had a completely free header in the box.

“With five minutes to go, that’s difficult to understand with the experience we have at the back. I’m disappointed by the quality of our football and it was just not good enough.”

Arsenal now have only a couple of days to refocus and direction their anger towards Leicester who visit the Emirates on Tuesday night.

If the players are as devastated as Danny Welbeck claims, then we should hopefully get an appropriate backlash.

Sorry, Leicester.