Gyokeres: Arsenal have to embrace important games

Viktor Gyokeres has encouraged his Arsenal team-mates to move on from their defeat to Bournemouth and embrace their final matches of the season.

The Gunners fell to a 2-1 defeat to Bournemouth on Saturday, allowing Manchester City the chance to close the gap at the Premier League summit.

In the loss, Gyokeres scored his 18th goal in all competitions this season – among all players to debut for Arsenal in the Premier League era (from 1992-93), only Thierry Henry in 1999-00 (26) and Alexis Sanchez in 2014-15 (25) scored more in their debut campaign with the Gunners.

Nevertheless, after only suffering three defeats in their opening 49 matches of this season in all competitions (W37 D9), Arsenal have since lost three of their last four (W1).

Arsenal's performance against Bournemouth was far from their best as they produced just 0.19 xG from open play, their second lowest in a home league match on record (since 2021-22).

However, with their Champions League quarter-final second leg against Sporting CP coming up on Wednesday, Gyokeres believes they have the perfect chance to regain confidence.

"We didn't come up to our level throughout the game," Gyokeres said about Arsenal's display against Bournemouth.

"I think when we scored to make it 1-1, we felt good as a team. We had some dangerous chances before that, and we wanted to take control of the second half, but maybe we didn't create enough in attack. 

"They didn't create so much either, but they were clinical and they scored on the chances they got. That's why it wasn't a good result.

"We have a lot of important games to come and we need to embrace it and to enjoy playing those games. 

"Like I said, it's a great game to have in a few days, so we just need to recover now, leave this behind and make a very good performance on Wednesday."