Mikel Arteta has defended his approach to games as **Arsenal**prepare to play against Everton.
The Gunners are at the top of the Premier League, but their pragmatism and set-piece strategies have earned many critics, including from one manager in the division. Arteta refuses to rise to the noise, and he will take confidence from the results that the team continue to grind out from week to week.
“*Fabian Hurzeler*has now certain comments that he made before and that says, I think, a lot of positive things about him as a person. So, I appreciate that and the rest, you know, I think he’s a fantastic coach. The job that he’s doing at Brighton is really, really good and that’s fine.
“You just have to go in that dressing room and feel the mood, the energy and the way we talk to each other and how much we value the position that we have right now and how much we want to, for sure be in the same position at the end of the season, and that depends on us. Our focus is on what we have to do, what we have to maintain and what we have to improve together.
“It's [about] playing the best football that you possibly can and the game demands to give you the best possibility to win the game and that's it. I realised what's happening in the Premier League the other day with a really important factor.
*“I was watching the Champions League game between Newcastle United and Barcelona. For me, Barcelona are the most exciting team in Europe in many moments the way they play, and they face one of the Premier League teams, Newcastle, who are exceptional in their intensity and the high pressure, everything man-to-man, a huge amount of tools, a really good team in transition and we saw a completely different game I've never seen Barcelona play and that's a huge credit to Newcastle.*
“This is the league that we are playing in. Have you seen the Barcelona 1,000 passes that does it every week in Spain? No. It was a very different kind of game. Can it be beautiful? Yes. But Newcastle made that game and so well done as well and a huge credit in the way they did it.
“If you want to be the best league in the world by far, you need to have that and entertaining and unpredictability. If not, it becomes boring and how difficult it is to beat any opponent and those numbers that you just mentioned, I think it's the best example of that.
“Everybody is learning from each other. It's like putting information in the best laptop every day and gathering what you do so well, I'm going to try to replicate it the same, the same, the same.
“With every opponent it's the same in that you try to predict what is going to happen tomorrow and I always do that. I think that's what they will do, I think that's the kind of situation, and the amount of situations you're going to have to defend in this specific way. This is what we have to do in attack to replicate these kinds of scenarios which are favourable for us and try to match those things.”