Arsène Wenger paid tribute to Mesut Özil and Danny Welbeck, two forwards who have come in for criticism over the past week, after the pair combined twice in two minutes to set Arsenal on the way to a 3-0 victory at Aston Villa.
The Arsenal manager said he had never been tempted to pull his misfiring £42m capture out of the starting lineup, despite the evident dissatisfaction of supporters, and implied that to do so would have undermined the German’s confidence.
“I thought it had come to the point where we needed to show our confidence in him,” Wenger said. “So I never really thought about dropping him, we rested Alexis Sánchez instead because he has played a lot of games. We adapted the system slightly to play Özil in the middle and he responded very well. He prefers playing in the middle but I can find you about 10 other players in my squad who would say the same. It was not just his performance, the whole team played very well. It was the response we needed after Tuesday.”
Welbeck did not score in the Champions League defeat at Borussia Dortmund but opened his account at Villa Park, with Özil providing the assist to return the favour that brought the opening goal. “The goal Welbeck scored was similar to the one he scored for England in Switzerland,” Wenger said. “Knowing the way the media works I was pleased he got the goal as quickly as possible, but he played a very good all round game. We were in control as soon as we went ahead and in the second half the game was a procession.”
Part of the reason for that was that Villa lost several players to a virus. Paul Lambert, showing some of the systems himself, may close the training ground for a couple of days this week to try to isolate the problem. “There’s a bug going round and we lost Nathan Baker and Darren Bent before the game, Ashley Westwood was sick in the warm up and Andreas Weimann was sick at half time,” the Villa manager said. “I’m not trying to make excuses, Arsenal were clinical, but our lads were running on empty and it is hard enough against the top teams when you are 100%. We tried to chase the game, but we just lost too many players.”