Arsenal ended their pre-season friendlies in a 1-0 defeat to north London rivals, Tottenham, at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.
Heung-Min Son scored a 79th-minute winner with a deadly near-post drive beyond Gunners goalkeeper Bernd Leno, giving Spurs’ new manager Nuno Espirito Santo a perfect start to life at Spurs.
Although the Gunners were unable to avoid their second successive defeat, summer-signings Ben White and Sambi Lokonga put up fine displays in the game ahead of next week’s season opener against Premier League newcomers, Brentford.
Reacting to his team’s defeat, manager, Mikel Arteta said, “To lose any game… to lose against them obviously even more. Take the positives and learn and for the next time be more prepared and better. We took a lot of good things. We played with a lot of kids as well who did extremely well today, so I think it’s good for the preparation.”
Speaking on Ben White’s performance, the Spaniard told the club’s website that “he was really good. But again, it’s a match where they haven’t played. Some of them they’ve [only] trained for four or five days. So you can still see and we didn’t want to risk many more, but it was a good start.”
on the pre-season campaign as a whole, he said, “In terms of preparation, we have done everything we could. With all the difficulties we’ve had with this Covid world and surprises but I think we improved a lot as a team and we worked on a lot of things. In some moments in games we put them the way we wanted and in some others we’ve still made some errors that are costing us games.”
