Arteta has ‘flavour’ Arsenal could have ended ‘immense’ week with win at Chelsea

Each team will face a tough test as they face Tottenham, Bayern Munich and Chelsea in a week’s time and achieving two wins and a draw cannot be considered anything other than a positive comeback, but Arsenal might be left thinking they could have done even better.

After a superb performance to beat rivals Spurs before sending Bayern Munich to the Emirates, Sunday’s clash with Chelsea was always going to be difficult with limited recovery time.

And preparations were further disrupted when key defender William Saliba was ruled out due to a knock he suffered during training; The France national team is preparing for more tests.

Given this context, the 1-1 draw, achieved through Mikel Merino’s header, left Arsenal five points clear at the top of the table. However, coach Mikel Arteta, who saw his team playing against 10 men for most of the match after Moises Caicedo’s red card, also admitted that the opportunity to further widen the gap was missed.

“It was an important week, starting with the derby,” he said. ” We will play against Bayern Munich in three days [and] We lost our players in those matches.

“For example today we had to play a partnership [in defence] We’ve never played a really difficult match before.

“The captain is still not here (Martin Odegaard), the nine guys are still not here (Viktor Gyokeres), Kai (Havertz) is still not here. We also lost Leo (Trossard) in the middle of the week, but the team had to react to that.”

Odegaard and Gyokeres came off the bench for Arsenal in the second half against Chelsea.

“Overall I think it was a really positive week because the challenge was so great,” Arteta added.

“But I have a feeling we should have had today and we could have won the game but we didn’t. That’s a learning point from this.”