Forget failure, Wenger tells Gunners

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger

Arsene Wenger has told Arsenal to approach the Premier League run-in without fear of failure as they fight Everton for fourth place, Skysports reports.

Arsenal needed penalties to avoid the nightmare of an FA Cup semi-final defeat against Championship side Wigan on Saturday – hours after Everton won at Sunderland to move two points clear in the race for fourth.

In the aftermath of that Wembley win Lukas Podolski said it would be “a disaster” if Arsenal were to miss out on Champions League football for the first time since 1997.

But ahead of West Ham’s visit on Tuesday night Wenger urged his players to forget the repercussions of failure and concentrate on getting the job done in the next five games.

“When you are in a semi-final and you win it releases a little bit of pressure on the team, but we want to bounce back in the Premier League,” he said.

“We know that one of the main targets – the main target – is the Premier League, and therefore we want to finish strong. We have a battle with Everton and it’s now down to consistency in the final games.

“Five victories is the target. Do you need it? Nobody knows, but the target is of course to win every game.

“We just want to not imagine the consequences of not doing it, what you want is just to focus on doing it.”

Arsenal’s league form is poor with just one win in six games, and Podolski, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Nacho Monreal will all need assessing before the West Ham game.

Several key players remain out, but Laurent Koscielny and Tomas Rosicky could be back and Wenger expects to have Mesut Ozil fit for the weekend trip to Hull.

Wenger said, “We are slowly getting our players back, so the squad is not so depleted any more.

“I believe that Everton have difficult games and we have difficult games, but we want to focus now on what we know we can do.

“We have a more complete squad and we want to win our games, no matter what Everton does. We want to finish in a strong way.

“We can finish the season well – we can finish in the top four, we can win the FA Cup – so it’s down to how united we will be until the end of the season, and focused together.”