Wenger lays blame for Stoke goal in right place

Arsène Wenger has accepted that the team has to take full responsibility for the goal conceded at Stoke on Saturday.

Arsenal slipped to a frustrating defeat at Stoke, a week after scraping a win against Leicester. Whilst Arsène thinks the team defended acceptably in the Premier League opener, and were just unlucky to concede from every shot, this time he has said that there’s no shifting the responsibility.

Wenger told the Arsenal website: “Last week we conceded two goals on corners.

“They only had three shots on goal, so I don’t feel that we defended that badly. On set-pieces, yes.

“Today I would say that we can look at ourselves and we are 100 per cent guilty on the goal we conceded.”

There’s certainly no excusing the way that the Arsenal team just let Stoke walk through them unchallenged for their goal. After the Gunners had a decent enough first half, and looked the more likely to score, the goal conceded so soon after half-time just made the whole situation more difficult.

Stoke had something to defend, and no longer had any need to push forward. At the bet365 Stadium, in particular, the crowd won’t get on your back to attack. As long as they have the lead, they’ll happily watch 45 minutes of defending and time-wasting. So the pressure is off.

Arsenal have to take a large portion of the blame for allowing Stoke into that situation. There was some debate over whether the Gunners should have had a penalty, and the nature of Lacazette’s disallowed goal was controversial, but overall that still didn’t excuse the goal conceded.