Wenger refuses to take fourth successive defeat to heart
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Your support makes all the difference.The good news for the Arsenal team who suffered a fourth successive defeat on Wednesday, 2-1 at Borussia Dortmund, is that they are still some way from going down in history as perpetrators of the club's longest losing sequence. That dubious honour belongs to the class of 1977, containing Liam Brady, Alan Hudson, Malcolm Macdonald and Frank Stapleton, who contrived to lose eight games in four weeks as Terry Neill struggled to win over the dressing-room in his first season as manager at Highbury.
However much longer the run progresses – a visit to Fulham on Sunday is the next opportunity to end it – it seems unlikely that Arsène Wenger will take a leaf from Neill's book of man-management in telling the media: "We couldn't have beaten 11 dustbins today." The Double winners are not yet playing rubbish and, even if they were, it is not the Frenchman's style to castigate his team in public.
On Wednesday, Wenger's mood was influenced by the fact that Arsenal had qualified for the second phase of the Champions' League despite losing. So he was able to indulge in smiling sarcasm at the expense of the referee ("he scored a good second goal") and to insist: "We have to take the positive things out of the game."
Qualification apart, it was hard to draw positives from the game. Few observers agreed with the manager's suggestion that his back four did "very, very well"; Robert Pires may have started a game for the first time in seven months, but made little contribution to it and the need to employ Fredrik Ljungberg as a second striker illustrated how alarmingly few options there are once Dennis Bergkamp is not available.
On David Seaman opinion was divided: leaden-footed for the first goal and a touch slow coming out to concede a penalty, or unluckily beaten by Gilberto Silva's deflection and cheated by Jan Koller's theatricals? Either way, there is only so much misfortune a goalkeeper, or a manager, can afford after eight goals conceded in four games.
Arsenal's captain Patrick Vieira, who will be suspended for the Fulham game, insists that morale remains high. "We are creating so many chances and maybe we just need a little bit more luck in front of goal and defensively. We believe in ourselves and we are going to come back really strong," he said.
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