Arteta: Arsenal will stick together despite leaders suffering defeat to Everton

Mikel Arteta has promised to surround his Arsenal players with love to prevent the title wheels coming off after an unexpected 1-0 defeat at Everton.

Arteta watched his Premier League leaders turn in their worst performance of the season at Goodison and Manchester City could close the gap to two points if they beat Spurs on Sunday.

But instead of laying into his team, Arteta has decided to allow them an off-day against a club where he spent six years as a player.

‘I want the team to know how much I love them. I love them much more now than three hours ago, a week ago, a month ago, three months ago,’ he said poetically.

‘It’s very easy to be next to the players when they’re winning and performing. These are the moments when I love my players and staff more and we’re going to stay together.

‘This journey is going to be difficult and challenging and there’s going to be big stones in the middle and we have to overcome that.

‘Now we have to prepare the week really well to get to Saturday with the right emotional spirit to beat Brentford.’

Arsenal are next in action against The Bees on Saturday and follow that by entertaining City on February 15.

Despite Everton performing better than expected for their new manager Sean Dyche, Arsenal were strangely lethargic having previously only one league game all season.

‘Everton were really good. We have to congratulate them but from our side it was disappointing because the performance didn’t reflect what we’ve been doing.

‘They were really direct and we struggled to control that type of game. Then with the amount of open situations we generated in the final third, that has to finish with goals and clear cut chances more than we’ve done today.’

Jorginho failed to make an impact after he came on as substitute for his Arsenal debut following a £12mililon deadline day from Chelsea but he wasn’t the only to struggle.

‘After we made the changes, we started to give away a lot of free kicks and a lot of rash decisions which is exactly what they wanted,’ added Arteta.

‘The best way to respond is understand who we are, how we got where we are and start to do the basic things right.’

Everton never finished below 11th in Arteta’s six years as a club and he wanted to be generous about their performance under Dyche.

‘The new manager bounce shouldn’t take credit away from Sean and the team. It’s one thing to say it and another thing to do it and they did it today,’ he said.