Koscielny urges under-fire Gunners to ‘fight together’

LAURENT KOSCIELNY has called for everyone involved at Arsenal to stick together despite admitting a top-four finish would now be “very hard” to achieve following the defeat at Brighton.

The Gunners lost their fourth successive game in all competitions to up the pressure on manager Arsene Wenger and all but end their forlorn hopes of returning to the Champions League through their Premier League position.

Wenger admitted after back-to-back 3-0 defeats to Manchester City – including the Carabao Cup final – that the confidence of his players was low.

“We need to stay together, to fight together,” he said.

“It is a big period for us, we know it is difficult but you need to put your head down and work every day.

FREEDOM

“We need to win to have more freedom on the pitch and we need to stay together because it is a bad period but all the players, staff and fans need to know that we are all together. It is important to have everyone behind us.”

The defeat maintains some shocking statistics associated with Arsenal, who have won only three away league games all season and have now lost eight of their last 13 games.

That run has left them 13 points adrift of Tottenham in fourth place and Koscielny conceded it would be difficult to overturn such a deficit.

“It will be very hard to finish in the top four.

“We have (had) a bad period and did not have the results we wanted. We lost our confidence a little bit and on the pitch we didn’t have the confidence we needed to push ourselves more and to play well with the ball.”