Mikel Arteta did not hide his frustration after Arsenal were overwhelmed at Brighton, admitting that his side were second best almost immediately in a defeat that exposed a clear gap in intensity.<\/p>\n
Brighton\u2019s 3-0 victory, delivered on the club\u2019s 125th anniversary, was fully deserved and became Arsenal\u2019s heaviest loss in more than three years. Although the opening goal did not arrive until the 31st minute, the contest had already tilted decisively in Brighton\u2019s favour long before that. Their pressing from the first moments left Arsenal struggling to cope, and the visitors never recovered.<\/p>\n
“In the first throw, you could sense it, it was so clear,” Arteta fumed, his voice barely raised above a furious whisper as he scowled through his postmatch media duties. “We put ourselves in trouble one time, two times, three times, and we need to get out of that much quicker. And that\u2019s one of the biggest lessons that we have to take from the game.”<\/p>\n
Arsenal were warned by Brighton\u2019s recent form without the ball, and Arteta acknowledged that the message had been discussed beforehand. “The first thing that we had discussed, it was about the first pass,” Arteta confirmed. “If you don\u2019t get out of that first pass as winners, it will be extremely difficult to dominate the game, and you don\u2019t have any probability of winning the game.<\/p>\n
“We knew that, but that\u2019s again, credit to them for what they\u2019ve done, because they overcame us, and they had another edge than we did, and that\u2019s something that, at this level, it\u2019s extremely important to respect and to understand before anything else.”<\/p>\n
He also accepted that Brighton were stronger in the decisive duels. Arteta said Brighton “had another bite.” “There was a lot of moments when the ball is 50-50, and it changes hands, and most of the time it was for them.”<\/p>\n
Asked whether he had considered a halftime change, Arteta admitted the thought was there but said he chose against it. “I was,” Arteta admitted after a moment of reflection, “but I would believe it wasn\u2019t the right moment to do that with the things that we wanted to change for the second half.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arteta admitted Arsenal were second best from the start as Brighton dominated them in a 3-0 defeat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,773],"tags":[1836,1162],"class_list":["post-19875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-brighton-hove-albion","tag-2026-27-premier-league","tag-analytics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}